


a simple thing

by iridan



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, The Mandalorian (TV)
Genre: BDSM, Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, Cultural Differences, Deradicalization, Din 'I Can't Talk Right Now I'm Doing Queer Person With Religious Trauma Shit' Djarin, Grief/Mourning, Injury Recovery, Kink Negotiation, Lightsabers (Star Wars), M/M, Makashi Is The Sexiest Lightsaber Form Send Tweet, Mandalorian Adoption (Star Wars), Mandalorian Culture (Star Wars), Mandalorian Morality, POV Third Person Limited, Polyglot!Din, Rebuilding A Culture Is Hard, Religious Guilt, Slow Burn, Touch-Starved, Tusken Raiders Culture (Star Wars)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-01
Updated: 2021-03-14
Packaged: 2021-03-17 11:28:11
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 48,126
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29099556
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iridan/pseuds/iridan
Summary: Boba Fett likes to be in control. Din Djarin feels more out of control with every passing day. Giving control over to Boba would make both of them happy. Din just doesn't understand why that has to be socomplicated.(Or, rebuilding an entire culture is hard. Boba helps, more or less.)
Relationships: Din Djarin & Grogu | Baby Yoda, Din Djarin/Boba Fett
Comments: 148
Kudos: 419





	1. rang

**Author's Note:**

> Me, an idiot: I want to write a fic about Din rebuilding Mandalore!  
> Also me, just, incomparably stupid: Okay, but only in the context of a long-term, slowburn BDSM relationship with Boba Fett. 
> 
> What can I say. The manspreading on Jabba's throne really, uh. Awakened something in me. 
> 
> This fic is not going to be half as short as it should be. Sorry. Tags will be updated as we go!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Me, an idiot: I want to write a fic about Din rebuilding Mandalore!  
> Also me, just, incomparably stupid: Okay, but only in the context of a long-term, slowburn BDSM relationship with Boba Fett.
> 
> What can I say. The manspreading on Jabba's throne really, uh. Awakened something in me.
> 
> This fic is not going to be half as short as it should be. Sorry. Tags will be updated as we go!

a simple thing

“Ugh,” said the Duros piloting the battered freighter Din had chartered off Nar Shaddaa. “You sure this is where you wanna stop, Mando? Nothin’ much on Tatooine these days, not since old Jabba died.” 

Din said nothing. The shuttle rattled unhappily as it slid down through Tatooine’s atmosphere. The vibration echoed through Din’s beskar and made his teeth ache. He ignored it and focused on the sea of sand growing in the viewport, pulling himself out of his cloudy thoughts with some effort. 

The Duros waited another few seconds for a response, then grunted. “Have it your way,” he said, fiddling with the controls. The freighter moaned again, heat shields flaring, and the sea of sand underneath them began to resolve itself into rolling red dunes and high plateaus scored with cool, dark canyons. 

Din had always liked Tatooine, despite what the rest of the galaxy said about it. Granted, the rest of the galaxy didn’t have climate controls wired underneath their beskar, but Din had liked Tatooine even before he’d earned a full _beskar’gam._ Tatooine was an honest place. Wild, vicious and packed to its moons with criminals of every shape and size, but honest. 

After the places Din had been the last few cycles, he’d appreciate some honesty. At least on Tatooine he could expect that someone always had a blaster aimed at his back. 

The Duros pilot continued to ramble as the freighter made its final approach. Round, snubby white buildings rose out of the sand like blunted bones. Din had wanted to charter straight to Mos Pelgo, which was both out of the way and deep in Tusken territory, safe behind the sand peoples' fearsome reputation, but Mos Pelgo didn’t have a spaceport so once again Din watched as the grimy, crooked shape of Mos Eisley clawed its way out of Tatooine’s dust, looking just a little bit grimier and a little bit more crooked than it had a few months back. 

A pang that had nothing to do with the freighter rattling and bouncing around went through Din’s chest, aching like a bruise. He pulled his mind away from it. The pilot didn’t pick Pelli’s bay, anyway--the Duros had no way of knowing that Din had been here before, would prefer a private bay and a private way out of the city. The Duros picked a public bay and settled down beside a battered _Outrider-_ class shuttle and an G9 Rigger that looked like it hadn’t flown since the Clone Wars. Din sighed. He’d draw attention to himself anyway. Silver beskar usually did. 

“Keep the change,” Din said, climbing out of his seat before the shuttle’s engines had stopped their groaning, tossing the Duros his payment. Nar Shaddaa hadn’t had much by way of employment, not even for someone with Din’s particular skill set, but Gideon’s light cruiser had been well-stocked with everything from Imperial credits to Calamari flan, so Din at least wouldn’t need to work for a while. 

_Or ever again, if Kyrze gets her way._

The darksaber, hidden underneath the folds of Din’s cloak, was heavy on his hip. The pilot hadn’t seen it, nor had anyone on Nar Shaddaa. Din hadn’t been careful enough in hiding it the first few times he’d ventured outside of the light cruiser, and even though the blade was black and hummed like struck beskar it was apparently recognizable the galaxy over as a Jedi weapon. Din had been jumped twice by bounty hunters thinking him a Jedi. He still had bruises from the second, a big Lasat who’d nearly put Din through a wall. They’d twinged and ached for days every time Din took a deep breath, but they’d healed enough to be irritating instead of grounding or useful. 

Din was more careful with the darksaber now. He would have just left it behind on the light cruiser but Koska had told him to keep it with him. 

“I don’t want it,” Din had told her for the thousandth time since he’d picked the damn thing up off the floor. “It’s useless to me. Just extra weight.” The only close-quarters fighting Din’d ever trained in had been staves and knives. The darksaber wasn’t the right size for either style, and Din had no interest in holding onto the thing long enough to learn how to use it. He preferred the spear. 

“I don’t care,” Koska’d told him, bluntly. “You can’t leave it here. It’ll drive Bo mad, and it’s yours by right anyway.” 

So Din, tired of losing the same argument, had resentfully clipped the darksaber to his belt, hidden it under his cloak and gone off to Tatooine. As long as he made it to safe ground without anyone seeing it, he ought to be alright. Din was sorely tempted to bury the cursed thing in the sand and forget about it, but then Kryze _would_ kill him, and Din had promised to help her in her quest since she had helped him in his. 

Still, it _was_ tempting. 

Din stepped out into the open air, moving quickly, head up, searching for white helmets and black blasters. The Imperial Remnants had heard about Gideon’s defeat by now, but the last intel Cara’d sent Din’s way had said that the Remnants were all fleeing the ‘rims, retreating deeper and deeper into Wild Space, harried by the New Republic and its patchwork band of allies. No one else would bother tracking Din to Tatooine. The New Republic had forgotten about Tatooine entirely, it seemed, and between Karga’s grip on the Guild and the wider chaos in the rest of the galaxy, Din’s enemies were thin on the ground. 

The Duros spluttered a thanks behind Din as he left the freighter, shouting at his back, but Din didn’t turn around. He had no intention of chartering a flight off Tatooine; when he left he’d do it in his own ship. 

_Vanth might have one for me,_ Din reasoned, shoving down another rib-deep pang. He had refused all of the shuttles on the light cruiser, missing the _Crest_ fiercely, but sentiment wouldn’t get Din very far. It was time to find another transport of his own. _And if he doesn’t, Fett will._

Fett was the one who’d called Din to Tatooine. Fett and Fennec had stuck around for a little while after Gideon’s defeat--Din determinedly thought of the events on the light cruiser only as _Gideon’s defeat_ and nothing else--mostly, as far as Din could tell, to keep an eye on Din himself. Din didn’t know what else the pair could have been doing. He’d spent most of Fett’s time about the light cruiser unconscious and in bacta, which has been a new and embarrassing experience. 

Apparently, as soon as the Jedi had closed the bridge doors and vanished from view, taking the kid with him, Din had folded up like a piece of wet flimsi and hit the floor. He’d woken up three days later suspended in bacta, staring at an irritated med droid, his _beskar’gam_ in a tidy pile in the corner of the med bay. 

Fett had stuck around long enough for Din to come out of bacta--and later surgery, once the med droid had determined that the bones in Din’s right arm were too brittle to ever heal properly and needed plates screwed in--and start wobbling around the cruiser like a baby nerf figuring out its legs for the first time, then he’d slapped Din across the shoulder, grabbed Fennec and hit the black. Din hadn’t heard from him for weeks. He hadn’t really expected to hear from Fett again, actually, until the cruiser’s comms had gone off and Fett’s rough voice had filled the bridge. 

_I should’ve known he’d come back here,_ Din thought, weaving his way through the familiar, sand-blasted streets of Mos Eisley. The crowds parted for him easily, shifting out of his way like minnows clearing the waters for a colo claw fish. Mos Eisley was used to bounty hunters, even Mandalorian ones, and nobody paid Din any mind. 

Tatooine had its own strange kind of gravity, especially for people like Fett. Din’d felt the pull of it too from time to time. He’d first come to the planet as a newly-minted warrior of his tribe, stubborn and proud, but he still remembered those first few nights out in the Great Dune Sea, the cold of the desert and the clarity of the stars. 

_Maybe we should try and build Mandalore here,_ Din thought, imagining Kryze’s reaction to the suggestion. He smiled grimly under his helmet. He hadn’t been able to goad Kryze into punching him yet, but he’d find her limits eventually. 

_Just have to get her away from Reeves and Woves._ The other Mandalorians--Axe Woves having rejoined their little band in the days after Gideon’s defeat--very rarely let Kryze out of their sight and never let Kryze and Din spend any time in a room alone together. 

Din had the vague suspicion that their behavior was more for Din’s protection than Kryze’s, but thinking about it for too long made Din’s beskar tight and heavy, his breath short, so he tried not to think about it at all. He’d left all three behind, anyway, and wouldn’t have to think about them at all until his business on Tatooine was done. 

_Speaking of business_ … 

Din hadn’t exactly been surprised to hear that Fett had gone back to Tatooine, but there was a difference between coming back to Tatooine to find work--there was always, always bounty hunter work on Tatooine--and coming back to take over a slice of the Hutt syndicate. 

From what Din could see, it didn’t look like the Hutts had tried to take the planet back yet. Jabba the Hutt’s palace loomed whole and ominous in the distance, set far enough away from Mos Eisley to shimmer in and out of view in the ever-present desert haze. Every twist of the wind shifted the palace’s shape, domes and spires wavering in the sun. A trickle of speeders and transports moved between the city and the palace. 

_Should be easy to get out there, then._

Despite the change in leadership, Mos Eisley was just as rowdy as it always was. Music and light spilled out of cantina doors and jawas worked the crowds. The smell of spiced bantha meat hung in the air, strong enough that Din could smell it even underneath his helmet. 

His mouth watered. The light cruiser had been stocked with nothing but Imperial rations. Din hadn’t had anything as good as chuba stew since before Tython -- he’d made _tiingilar_ and _uj_ cake in the _Crest’s_ battered kitchen on the trip over, laughing when the kid got his first noseful of the _tiingilar’s_ spices.

 _I can eat at the palace,_ Din told himself, wrenching his thoughts away from memories of the kid before his chest could start to hurt. He repeated the words his teachers had pounded into his head. _Focus, Mandalorian._ If Fett didn’t have anything to eat, Mos Pelgo would. Tatooinians had almost as good a tolerance for spice as Mandalorians. 

Din stopped in a grimy cantina long enough to rent a speeder, conscious of the eyes on his beskar, on his spear, and hit the desert road, following the snaking line of speeder dust towards the looming palace. 

The speeder moved fast enough to whisk away Tatooine’s oppressive heat and Din’s increasingly circular thoughts, its engines growling as they echoed off the canyons. The palace reared up ahead of Din within a few minutes, enormous and squat and ugly, though the usual battalion of Gamorrean guards was gone.

Din didn’t know how Fett had cracked the Hutt’s palace but however he’d done it, he’d done it without wrecking the place. The doors, as Din pulled up and left the rented speeder under the watchful eye of a shaggy-faced Bothan, were solid and set well on their hinges. The palace walls were scored with carbon marks and dents but none looked particularly fresh, and most of the holes in the wall had been repaired with fresh plaster and left to cure under the suns. 

The Bothan made no move to stop Din or even to check his weapons, only grunting as Din parked the speeder and tapping away at a datapad. Din ignored the Bothan and moved on, picking his way around other speeders towards the palace's great doors.

“I’m here to see Fett,” Din told the guard at the door. This one was human, dark-skinned and clean-shaven, a gnarled scar twisting the left side of his mouth. A pulse rifle was strapped to his back, but in his hands he carried a short, solid-looking wooden club. 

_Traditional,_ Din thought. 

The human looked Din up and down. “You Mando?” he said. 

Din raised his eyebrows underneath his helmet. _Is Fett getting a lot of Mandalorian visitors?_ “Yes,” he said. 

The human nodded. “Boss’s waitin’,” he said. “Throne room. Up the stairs, take a right, down the stairs, you’re there.” He made no move to check Din for weapons, nor did he say anything about the beskar spear or the blaster on Din’s hip. Jabba had made a show of checking all his guests but if Fett was worried about assassination, his people certainly weren’t. 

“Thanks,” said Din. He’d been to the throne room -- he’d done a few jobs for Jabba back in the day, though he’d quit coming out this way once the covert had moved to Nevarro -- but it had been years, and the palace had changed hands a few times since then. Din couldn’t remember who’d taken the throne after Jabba had died. Some Twi’lek, he thought, but he’d never paid enough attention to politics to care. 

The human let Din pass through the doors and into the cool, dark palace. 

_Maybe not as dark as I remember,_ Din thought. 

In Jabba’s day, the palace had been close and dank and filthy. The only lights had been bantha-fat lanterns and sunlight through grimy windows. The halls had been filled with Gamorreans and slaves and slimy, oozing sycophants, all of them caught in Jabba’s orbit like flies in a web. 

Jabba had paid well, but Din had hated coming here. When the covert had moved to Nevarro, well outside Tatooine’s orbit, he’d been a little relieved, even if he liked the rest of the planet well enough. 

Under Fett, though, the halls were different. The stinking bantha-fat lanterns had been replaced by softly-glowing light cells. The Gamorreans were gone. The odd droid moved from room to room, but Din didn’t see any slaves either. The hall had even been swept recently, and the air smelled faintly of incense or spice. Someone had even cleaned the windows, letting sunlight spill in across the sandstone floors. 

Din kept his pace even, unhurried. He could hear music drifting up from the throne room and he hesitated at the top of the steps, oddly nervous. 

_Why did Fett call for me?_ He wondered. He hadn’t asked himself that question when Fett’s transmission had come through, desperate to get off the light cruiser and away from Bo-Katan Kryze and her machinations, but now that he was here, about to step into Boba Fett’s throne room, it struck him that maybe he should have asked. 

_He is my ally,_ Din told himself, trying to shake off his nerves. Fett had helped him find the kid. Fett hadn’t said much in his message, just that he’d had something for Din to look at, but he probably just had a job. He’d been _beroya_ too -- he probably just wanted Din’s help for a hunt. 

_Focus,_ Din thought again, shaking his head a little. The motion did nothing to clear the dull ache that had lurked behind Din’s eyes since he’d woken up in bacta. He gritted his teeth and pushed his tension aside, struggling to bring his singing nerves back under control. _Twenty years a hunter,_ he thought, a little bitterly. _Twenty years, and it’s only now that I’m slipping._

Din made his way down the stairs, hands curled tight. He didn’t reach for the spear or the blaster strapped to his thigh, but he thought about it. 

_Fett is my ally,_ he told himself. _My ally. He’s not trying to trap me._

_...But I’ll steer clear of the rancor pit’s gate, just in case._

The throne room was different than Din remembered. He reached the last step and paused, surprised. What had once been a hot, fetid room full of bodies and chains and garish trophies had been cleared out almost entirely. Gone were the stands where musicians had played, the platforms where slaves had danced. Fett had kept the bar and a small band of Rodians played strange-looking pipes in one corner, but the rest of the throne room had been converted into a cavernous, open space, all of it viewable from the throne. 

Jabba’s lounge was gone too, his couch and his pillows and the little mud wallow he’d sometimes rolled in while taking visitors. The throne Fett had replaced all of that with was simple. It stood up on a dais to give Fett the best view of the room and was made of solid, dark wood, like the wood Tusken _gadderffii_ were made of. Fett himself was sprawled in it lazily, his beskar still painted green, one leg cocked off the edge of the throne. Fennec stood at Fett’s back, her hip cocked against the chair, pulse rifle strapped to her shoulders. 

She saw Din first. She nudged Fett’s shoulder and raised a hand, offering Din a smile that flashed like a vibroblade. 

He inclined his helmet. 

Silence fell over the room. Fett didn’t keep a packed audience like Jabba had. There were a few handfuls of people scattered here and there; a knot of Florrians by the bar, a Twi’lek serving drinks, a black-furred Wookiee grumbling to a droid, some humans in Tatooine-style loose tunics who were eyeing a pair of Tuskens mistrustfully. 

_The Wookiee’s a hunter,_ Din thought, forcing himself to catalog the room and its inhabitants, the familiar process settling his nerves. _The Florrians smugglers. The humans are locals, probably._

“Mando,” Fett called, his voice deepened by his vocoder. “You made good time. We weren’t expecting you for a few rotations.” 

Din stopped before just the throne, at the edge of the rancor’s grate, tilted his head and shrugged. “I wasn’t too far out, when your message came through,” he said. “I took a shuttle off Nar Shaddaa.” 

Fett whistled. “Nar Shaddaa? What were you doing there?” 

Din shrugged again. “Passing through,” he said. His nerves twitched, unsteady. He frowned at himself underneath his helmet. _Don’t lose it,_ he thought. 

Fett waved a hand and the Twi’lek serving drinks came over, her movements long and graceful. She wasn’t a slave, that much Din could tell -- she had no chains on, and she was wearing actual clothes instead of the rags Jabba forced his slaves into -- and she cast Din an appraising look underneath her eyelashes. Din didn’t move. 

“A drink for my friend here,” said Fett.

“I’m fine.” 

“You sure?” Fett said, cocking his head. “Not even _tihaar?_ ” 

Din blinked. “....Where’d you get _tihaar?_ ” Based on Kryze’s virulent dislike of Fett -- Din still didn’t really understand that, either, the way Kryze seemed to hate him -- he was surprised that other Mandalorians would trade with Fett. But his heart lifted, a little. If Fett had _tihaar,_ he might know where to find other Mandalorians. 

_Mandalorians like me,_ Din thought, though he felt a stab of guilt as soon as he thought it. His covert wouldn’t take Din back, not after he’d removed his helmet. But Kryze and her kind were strange and confusing, and Fett even more so. Din missed the solidity of his own tribe. He missed knowing where his place in the world was. 

Fett huffed, sounding amused. “I made it, Mando. Old family recipe. Well, sort of -- had to make this batch with _meza_ instead of _psid’ik,_ since nothing else grows on this dustball. It’ll put the shine on your helmet.” 

Din hadn’t had _tihaar_ in years. His covert hadn’t ever had enough fresh fruit to distill it, and their _alor_ had looked down on imbibing anyway. Still, his mouth watered. Before Din had been his covert’s hunter, the older warriors had brought some back for the younger ones a few times. It had felt like a great secret, sneaking drinks while their _alor_ had been hosting another covert’s leader, laughing as the play fights between warriors got sloppier and sloppier. 

Din pushed those memories aside too. “I’m fine,” Din repeated, with some effort. He couldn’t afford to get drunk here, in Fett’s kingdom. At least not without knowing what Fett wanted, and if he could be trusted or not. 

_Not that I’ve been the best judge of that, lately._

“If you’re sure,” Fett hummed, and waved the Twi’lek off. He tilted his head and Fennec leaned down. Din’s auditory sensors were good, but not good enough; the noise in the throne room had tentatively picked back up again, and Fett spoke quietly. 

Din waited. 

After a moment, Fennec slid off the throne and padded towards the bar, graceful as a vine tiger. Din looked at Fett, confused. 

“I’ve got business,” Fett said, tone apologetic underneath the vocoder’s modulation. “Like I said, we didn’t expect you for a few rotations yet. But Shand’ll see you fed and watered, if you’re hungry, and then you and I can get to our business.” 

“We have business?” Din asked, trying to parse Fett’s words out. He relaxed a fraction. If he and Fett had business, Fett wouldn’t try to kill him, at least not until their business had come closer to a conclusion. Besides, Fett was Mandalorian. Stabbing Din in the back while hunting together wouldn’t be his way. 

Fett laughed. Din’s confused frown deepened. He wasn’t sure what was funny. But Fett only nodded, the red stripes on his helmet bright and freshly painted, and waved Din off in Fennec’s direction. “Sure,” he said. “We’ve got business.” 

Din nodded too, satisfied, and uncurled his hands. Business was good. Business would give Din something to think about other than Kryze and the darksaber and Moff Gideon, than the darktroopers and their inexorable strength, than those doors closing on the Jedi and the kid. Business would give Din something to _do._

He made his way over to the bar, taking note of the sentients he passed. The Wookiee was definitely a hunter. Din gave him a wide berth. The humans had finally left off glaring at the Tuskens, who were having an entirely-silent conversation with their hands about water rights, and the Twi’lek was nodding along as Fennec outlined something for her. 

When Din finally made it to the bar, Fennec cocked her head at him and smiled. 

“You look better,” she said. 

Din grunted. The last time Fennec had seen him, he’d been fresh out of bacta and incredibly confused by the whole experience. It would be hard to look much worse. 

“How’s the head?” 

“Attached,” Din said, shortly. That was about all that could be said for it. Din’s beskar had held up against the darktrooper, but Din’s head hadn’t held up against the beskar. Din’s ears hadn’t stopped ringing. 

On the light cruiser, the med droid had been giving Din regular injections of bacta to help with the swelling and the pain, but Din hated how strange he felt afterwards, off-balance and cut to pieces by the slightest shaft of light, so he tried to avoid them when he could. 

Fennec made a sympathetic sound. “I hate bacta,” she said. “Everything tastes blue afterwards. You hungry? We can set you up in one of the conference rooms. Water?” 

Din hesitated. “I am hungry,” he admitted. He was relieved by Fennec’s offer to let him eat in private. She’d seen his face already -- by Creed, Din wasn’t supposed to have put his helmet back on. But the visor filtered out the worst of the light, blocked the smells that made him sick to his stomach and muffled the noises that made black spots flash in front of his eyes, and the helmet hid how confused he was, how out of his depth he felt. He’d put it back on after the bacta and had only taken it off in front of Kryze twice, both times quick and furtive, more for show than anything. 

Fennec smirked. “Our cook’s Tusken,” she said. “You up for some spice?”

Din brightened at that. “I lived with Tuskens, for a while,” he said. Most other sentients didn’t care for Tusken food, but it wasn’t that bad, really. A little heavy on womp rat for Din’s usual preference, but there wasn’t much else to eat out in the Dune Sea. 

“You’ll fit right in, then.” Fennec rolled her eyes and came up off her elbows, nodding at the Twi’lek before beckoning for Din to follow her. “Which tribe did you live with?” 

Din named the tribe with his hands, [_White_](https://www.signingsavvy.com/sign/WHITE/5092/1) [_Bantha_](https://www.signingsavvy.com/sign/BISON/1015/1) _,_ first putting his right hand to his chest and drawing it away, pulling his fingers together, then cupping each side of his forehead with his palms before turning his hands away in fists to mimic a bantha’s horns. If Fennec didn’t understand, she didn’t show it -- Tusken words didn’t translate well into Basic, and if Fett had lived with Tuskens for a time he would’ve told her that. Someone out in the desert had to have healed Fennec up, anyway. Tuskens didn’t have bacta but they were more than capable of rigging up prosthetics. 

“How long did you live with them?” Fennec asked, curiously. 

Din shrugged. “A while,” he said. Tracking the passage of years on Tatooine was difficult. Din had lived among the White Bantha for more than a standard year, but less than two. It had been a strange time, but Din had learned a lot. 

Fennec huffed. “You’re worse than Boba,” she said, but she said it without any bite. 

She led Din to a small, neatly-kept room just off the main throne room. Whatever the room had been used for in Jabba’s day, it was just a simple meeting space now, stocked with a sturdy table, a few chairs and a cabinet full of bottles in one corner. To Din’s surprise there was already food waiting for him, an enormous plate of Tusken curry, a platter of _japoor_ bread, dried _tamur_ and even a glass of water. 

Fennec smiled. “Noora’s got a comm directly into the kitchen,” she explained. Noora must have been the Twi’lek at the bar. “And the kitchen’s got the whole palace rigged out; they can get food just about anywhere faster than you can draw that blaster.” 

Din eyed the unassuming little room again, a bit suspicious now. 

“Relax,” Fennec said, gesturing at the table. “I’ll keep watch. Enjoy -- Ushib’s curry’s hotter than the suns.” 

She skirted Din and slipped back out into the hall, where she closed the door behind her. Din waited for a few moments, tense and frozen, before he heard the unmistakable, if faint, sound of a body leaning back against the door. 

_She’ll keep watch,_ he thought, a little dazed. 

Mostly he was touched. Fennec wouldn’t let anyone come in while he ate. He’d still have to worry about someone popping up through whatever system of pulleys and tubes the kitchens had, but surely that system couldn’t be very large. And it didn't matter if anyone saw his face, anyway. The eyes of a servant in Fett's palace were the same as the eyes of an enemy under the Creed.

Din was safe. _You can eat,_ he told himself, curling his fingers around the edges of his helmet. _Fennec will keep watch, and she’s my ally. I have business with Boba Fett. It’ll be fine._

He struggled with himself for a moment, paranoia clawing at his ribs, but hunger won out. He released the seal on his helmet before he could let his instincts win and tugged the helmet up, the beskar digging into his fingers. 

The smell of the Tusken curry, made of spiced, stewed bantha, nearly knocked him over. Din was at the table, grabbing a piece of flat _japoor_ bread and inhaling curry, before he fully realized what was happening, his helmet abandoned and teetering precariously on the table’s edge. 

Din paused long enough to rescue the helmet -- Din had dishonored his people, but that didn’t mean he needed to dishonor the beskar itself -- then resumed bolting down as much curry as he could stomach. 

It _was_ spicy, the heat warming and clarifying at the same time. It wasn’t _tiingilar_ but it was close. Din managed about half the plate, sopping up stray bits of sauce with _japoor_ bread and cutting some of the spice with bites of _tamur_ , before he managed to slow down enough to drink some water. 

He hadn’t been eating well, on the light cruiser. Between the lights and the noise and the sickening, sterile smell of the whole ship -- what parts of it weren’t charred and blaster-burned, anyway -- even forcing down tasteless Imperial rations had been nearly insurmountable. 

Once, Din’s self-control had been unshakeable. He’d been able to make himself do, or not do, anything he’d needed to. 

_I’ve gone soft,_ Din thought, shamed. Breaking the Creed had broken Din, like durasteel that had been allowed to gather rust. Beskar never shattered but durasteel could, and Din wasn’t made of beskar. 

He pushed the thought away as hard as he could, though the shame lingered, like it always did. There was nothing to be done for it now. An action done couldn’t be undone. New actions could be taken, but nothing Din could ever do could -- could _fix_ a broken Creed. There was no atonement. 

_This is the Way._

The Tusken curry sat heavy in Din’s belly, like a molten stone. His mouth and his chest were full of ash. He pushed the plate away. 

His helmet stared at him from the end of the table, smooth and unblemished. Din had scrubbed all of the carbon burns out, had wiped his blood from the inside of the helmet until his fingers ached. 

The helmet was as inscrutable as always. The visor gleamed. 

Din swallowed, wiped his mouth, smoothed down the stray edges of his beard, and tugged the helmet back on, roughly. His _alor_ didn’t burst from the shadows and crack his head open, so Din figured he’d be safe to wear the helmet for another day. 

_Tomorrow,_ he told himself. _Tomorrow, I’ll take it off for good._

He’d told himself that every day since Gideon’s defeat. He hadn’t managed to keep his word yet. _Another failure._

Before Din could get too twisted up in his thoughts, there was a soft knock at the door and Fennec’s voice floated through it. 

“Mando?” she said. “Finished?” 

“Come in,” said Din, gruffly. The seal reengaged, closing Din off from the world, and he tugged his gloves back on. 

“So?” Fennec said, opening the door. She saw Din’s half-eaten plate and smiled. “What do you think? Hot enough for you?” 

Din made a rough, noncommittal noise. He got up to follow Fennec, ready to face whatever business Fett had for him.

“I’ll tell Ushib that you weren’t impressed.” Instead of leading Din back to the throne room, she took him the other way, down the hall and past more doors that opened up into similar meeting rooms. Most of them were empty. Most of the palace was empty, in fact; there were a few sentients lounging here and there, lurking in the shadows or enjoying the late afternoon Tatooine sun, but for such a large place, there were shockingly few people actually _in_ it. 

“Where is everyone?” Din finally asked, as Fennec led him deeper and deeper into the palace. 

“What do you mean?”

Din took a second to order his thoughts, reaching for careful words. He didn’t want to offend Fennec, or Fett, by accident. “Last time I was here,” he began, “it was… very loud. Packed. Its own little city.” 

“That was back in Jabba’s day, “ Fennec said. She rounded a corner and Din followed, tracking their route through the palace. “He died right around the time the Empire fell. I wasn’t in this part of the galaxy then, but I heard about it; I guess this whole hemisphere nearly tore itself apart filling the vacuum. Somehow Bib Fortuna--you ever meet him? Pale Twi’lek, always hanging off Jabba’s every word?”

Din grunted. He had met Bib Fortuna, if the Twi’lek he was thinking of was the right one. 

“Somehow _he_ ended up in Jabba’s chair,” Fennec continued. “Ran the whole operation nearly into the ground. There’s no one here because there haven't been any credits to be made here in years.” 

“Why’d you and Fett come in and take over, then?” Din asked curiously.

Fennec only shrugged. “I get bored easily,” she said. “And Boba’s pretty sure he can turn Fortuna’s operation back around. He can hardly make it worse, at least.”

Din supposed that was fair. He didn’t know Fett very well, but Fett's help had been invaluable. Din wouldn’t have found Gideon’s cruiser, wouldn’t have found the kid, without Fett. 

“Here,” Fennec said, gesturing down the hallway, which ended in a sturdy-looking door. “Boba will be in there.” 

“Thank you,” Din said, nodding at her. Fennec smiled. 

“I’ll tell Ushib to turn up the heat, if you’re sticking around for a few days,” she said. 

She left him at the end of the hall. Din eyed the door. 

_Fett will have work,_ he told himself. At this point, Din would be happy to muck out a rancor’s cage if it meant time away from the light cruiser and its occupants, their expectations. Mind decided, he swiped a hand over the door lock, which beeped once and let the door slide open. 

Fett was standing, bent over a holotable, his dented green helmet perched on the edge. He looked up when the door opened. When he caught sight of Din, he didn’t smile, exactly, but his expression lightened. His armor had picked up a few more scratches since Din had seen him last. His gauntlets had been raked by something with claws, the green paint peeled away to reveal shining beskar, and there was a carbon burn inches from Fett’s heart. 

“Mando,” he greeted. “Fennec take care of you?”

“She introduced me to Ushib’s cooking,” Din said. 

Fett hummed. “Ushib’s tribe found me,” he explained. “They got me back on my feet, after…” he ran a hand over his scarred head. Din understood. “Took care of Fennec, too.” 

Din nodded. The sand people, in his experience, were hard and brutal and capable of a viciousness unmatched in the galaxy. But their hospitality too was unmatched, if one managed to earn it. Din didn’t know what Fett had done to win the care of a Tusken tribe, but based on his own experiences whatever Fett had done had been impressive. 

“You called me here,” Din said, pulling his thoughts out of the desert sands. “What do you need?” 

“Ah.” Fett flicked off the display on the holotable -- a long string of numbers and letters that made no sense to Din -- and grabbed his helmet, buffing it with one arm before fixing it back over his head. “Yeah. Been digging around down here when I can. Found something you might be interested in. C’mere. Follow me.” 

“You found something?” Din hadn’t expected that, but he was curious now, curious enough to follow Fett through another door, this one leading into a curved, tunnel-like hallway. There were no windows, and the darkness made Din’s nerves tighten, his hand reaching for his blaster. 

“Careful in here,” said Fett. “‘S a tight fit. I don’t know how the old worm managed it.” 

“Where are we going?” Din picked his way into the tunnel after Fett, doing his best to ignore his prickling neck. 

“Jabba was worse than a krayt dragon, when it came to hoarding things,” Fett explained. Once they were properly in the tunnel, Din could see several other tunnels branching off every six or seven feet. “He kept all kinds of shiny bits down here. Fortuna -- did Fennec tell you about Fortuna? -- had no idea about it all, otherwise he’d’ve spent it on imported fruit and Twi’lek whores.” 

“I don’t have much interest in treasure,” Din said.

“You’ll be interested in this,” Fett said. 

As they went, Din’s curiosity grew, replacing his gnawing anxiety. The tunnels he could see led to wide, high rooms, and the things held in those rooms were strange and varied. One room held piles and piles of fine Yavini silk. Another held nothing but small golden orbs. A third was full of tanks of clear, greenish fluid, alien shapes floating lifelessly, and a fourth was packed with skeletons in every shape and size. Their empty eyes raised all the hair on the back of Din’s neck, made him glad he’d come down here armed. 

_So did Fett,_ he thought.

Fett was bristling with weapons. Blasters at his hips, the rocket launcher on his back, a set of vibroblades Din could barely see tucked flush against his wrists. The hilt of an old-fashioned _verd_ knife jutted up from one of his boots. 

“Kryze try to kill you yet?” Fett asked, sharing the hall so Din could match his pace. 

Din snorted. “No,” he said. “Koska won’t let her.”

“That the little one?” 

Compared to Fett, who was built like a gundark even if he wasn’t especially tall, most people were little. Din smiled to himself. 

“Yes,” he said. “She’s… I didn’t recognize the word she used to describe herself, but she’s Kryze’s second. Her… right hand. Sworn to guard Kryze’s honor, or something.” Koska had given Din a word in Mandalorian, _kal’vod,_ but it hadn’t been one of the handfuls of words he recognized. He hadn’t had much time in the Fighting Corps to learn Mandalorian, and his covert didn’t use the language. 

_A dead language from a dead planet,_ his teachers had always said. _A language that could get us all killed._ Din hadn’t wanted to show Koska just how little Mandalorian he actually knew, so he’d only nodded and stored the word away in his memory. 

Fett snorted. “Sounds like a thankless job, if you ask me.” Din hadn’t, but Fett had a point. Din had never heard of an honor-guard. His covert didn’t keep them; a warrior’s honor was their own, and only they could safeguard it for themselves. 

“We haven’t cleared it all the way out yet,” Boba said, stopping before a tunnel’s mouth. His broad body blocked Din from seeing what was inside. “Hutts live a long karking time, and Jabba had the whole palace riddled with hideaways like these. But when I found all this, I thought I should give you a call.” 

Fett stepped back. Din’s thoughts stuttered to a halt. 

The room was full of beskar. Piles and piles of it, grey and gleaming, arranged into stacks and piled as high as Din’s chest. 

He’d never seen so much beskar. All of it was melted down and packed into tidy ingots, stamped with the strange, spiky [ symbol ](https://th.bing.com/th/id/R3bc43ea3784fa610f16b3de40def586e?rik=neCUus6KKsNXgg&riu=http%3a%2f%2fimg1.wikia.nocookie.net%2f__cb20140509074001%2fswfanon%2fimages%2fa%2fa9%2fHutt_Cartel_Emblem.png&ehk=K2mk8JGU0BgrSojoZ3j%2fiEYR3QAshsfneoVHMlX0DP4%3d&risl=&pid=ImgRaw) of the Hutt Cartel instead of the Empire’s mark. Fett plucked an ingot off the stack and offered it to Din, who accepted it with numb fingers. 

He held it in his hand. The weight was right, the waves in the steel. He was no armorer, but he’d been highly-ranked enough in his covert to watch the armorer work. He knew what beskar looked like. 

Din tapped the ingot against his gauntlet anyway, just to hear the pure note rise into the air. The ingot sang and his armor echoed back. _Beskar._

“Jabba had all this?” Din asked, hoarsely. There was enough beskar here to armor his entire covert. Fifteen, twenty camtonos at least. 

“Yeah,” said Fett. “Don’t know where he got it from, but it’s been here a while. Knowing the old worm, he probably paid somebody to jack an Imperial shipment back during the days of the Purge. He did that from time to time, when he wanted to make a point, and then something new would catch his eye and he’d go off after that instead. There’s rooms and rooms just like this down here, though this is the only one I’ve found with any beskar.” 

Din’s grip on the beskar ingot tightened. He swallowed. All of this had been sitting here for over a decade, untouched. Unforged. Din’s covert had spent years on the brink of starvation, living hand to mouth, even their best warriors forced to wear durasteel, and all of this had been locked away down here to gather dust. 

Din made himself put down the ingot before he could get too angry. His fingers were trembling faintly. His jaw ached. 

“You can’t let Kryze know you have this,” Din said, training his eyes on the space just behind Fett’s head so that he wouldn’t punch the man in the throat and make off down the hallway with as much beskar as he could carry in his hands. Fett was reasonable. Din could work something out. He could hunt for Fett, in exchange for a little beskar at a time. It’d take years to earn it all, but Din would do it. “She will kill you, and Koska won’t hold her back.” 

Fett snorted. “I don’t want it,” he said. He waved a careless hand. “Take it with you. Give it to Kryze if you want, or drop it off with your own people, I don’t care. Put it to good use.” 

Din stared at him. “It’s yours,” he said, slowly. 

“I’ve already got my _beskar’gam._ ” Fett’s voice was firm. He rapped his knuckles against his chestplate. His father’s armor, Din remembered. “The kark do I need all this for?”

“You don’t -- what about your tribe?” Din didn’t understand. This much beskar would let Fett build a true fighting band. With how fortified the palace was, Fett’s tribe wouldn’t even have to hide. They’d be able to live as they wanted, armored and strong.

Fett laughed. “I have no tribe,” he said. “Just me. I’ve had enough of brothers. Well, there’s Fennec, I suppose, but she doesn’t want any beskar. Take it, _mand’alor._ It’s yours.” 

Din’s mouth was dry. His heart pounded. “What do you want in return?” Din was sharing a quest with Bo-Katan Kryze, and Krzye was Fett’s enemy. Armoring an enemy was dangerous. Fett’s gift wouldn’t come cheaply, but Din didn’t care. 

Fett was silent. “Mando,” he finally said, slowly, “it’s a gift. I don’t want anything.” 

“ _No,_ ” Din said, slashing a hand through the air before he could stop himself. “This is -- you can’t give this away. The debt --”

“Mando,” Fett said. His expression was impossible to read, but his tone was heavy, concerned. “There is no debt.” 

“There _is._ ” Din wanted to tear his helmet off and tug his hair in frustration. Fett had already seen his face. Din put the beskar ingot down like it had burned him, afraid to dishonor it with his own shame. “I’ll -- I’ll work for it. You have enemies -- you have to have enemies. The Hutts, people Bib Fortuna was paying off, the Empire. I don’t care. I’ll hunt them for you, in exchange for the beskar.” 

Fett huffed. “I don’t need a hunter,” he said. 

“Every syndicate needs a hunter,” Din countered. That was a fundamental truth of their part of the galaxy. Bounty hunters and assassins were essential. They were as integral to a criminal operation as bolts were to a ship. “Who do you have hunting for you? That Wookiee?” 

“Careful, brother,” Fett said, though this time his tone was round with amusement. “Kasyyk’s a fierce fighter.” 

“I can outfight him.” Din had no idea if that was true or not, but if he had to fight a Wookiee to earn all of this beskar, he’d do it with his bare hands.

“I believe you,” Fett said, and he sounded so absolutely sincere that Din paused, confused again. 

Fett sighed and rubbed the dent in him helmet. “I… have enemies,” he admitted. “But you’re not… you’re an ally. A… friend. You don’t have to _earn_ anything. I’ll give it to you. All of it.” 

“This is not the Way,” said Din. Beskar couldn’t be given. Beskar was _earned,_ through blood and sweat and glory and pain.

Fett sighed again. “If you’re sure,” he said. “Yeah, I’ve got enemies.” 

“I’ll do it,” Din said immediately. He didn’t care if Fett wanted him to hunt down the ghost of the Emperor himself. A hunt was good. A hunt was _work._ It’d keep Din off the light cruiser and give him a way to honor the beskar.

 _I can do it,_ Din told himself, curling his hands tightly. 

Fett shook his head. When his voice came through the vocoder again, it was smooth. “Alright,” he said. He regarded Din from behind his visor, the plates just as unreadable and distant as Din’s own. 

“Fine,” Fett said. His tone sent a shiver down Din’s spine. “Welcome to the family, Mandalorian.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some random notes:
> 
> -Dave Filoni's various timelines make no fucking sense to me. Assume Din is somewhere in his late thirties.  
> -American Sign Language (ASL) will proxy Tusken Sign Language in this fic. I'll include video links to demonstrate gestures when I can!  
> -The POV in this is third-person limited. Din is going to think a lot of things that aren't necessarily true or don't line up with what we the viewers think or know. He's doing his best.  
> -I have a truly ridiculous number of precise and hyperspecific headcanons for just about every peice of media I consume. Sorry for that also.  
> -Chief among those headcanons: 1) Din absolutely got his shit wrecked during that fight with the darktrooper. I don't care how hard beskar is, it punched him into a metal wall. This fic will deal with the fallout from that. 2) I know a lot of people headcanon that Din's covert would allow him to take his helmet off in front of Grogu/a partner, but I really don't think that they did. They're so, so weird about the helmet thing. 3) His covert also doesn't... seem like they have a real good grasp on other non-Death Watch Mandalorian traditions/ideas/cultural markers. When he ends up with the darksaber, Din is surprised a) that it's a thing b) that Mandalore has a single leader c) that anyone would want to be said leader and d) that winning the darksaber gives one a claim.
> 
>   
> Your Song of the Week is "A Horse With No Name," America.  
> For a glossary of mando'a/other Star Wars terms, see the chapter titled "Glossaries."
> 
> Thank you for reading!


	2. ca'tra

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You all. Your response to this fic has been so, so positive and so overwhelming ;__; I have the emotional depth of a puddle and the ability to process emotions of a muskellunge (i.e., none), but I'm so, so grateful for all of your comments, kudos, bookmarks and subscriptions! Thank you so much for taking this big first step with me! 
> 
> Fridays will be the usual updating days, because I like to end my week on a high note, not that I have any concept of days or the passage of time anymore. I know its Thursday, but I got excited. I don't know if I'll be able to manage weekly updates -- we're approaching our "busy season" at work, as the weather warms -- but expect biweekly at the longest! 
> 
> Remember that the glossary moves!

Din followed Fett back up to the throne room in a daze. Leaving all that beskar behind felt like leaving one of his own limbs, but Din managed it. Fett was a solid, steady presence just ahead of him, their business now formalized, so Din at least knew that Fett’s palace was safe ground.

Fett stayed silent. He evidently knew the palace well, moving through the halls with an unerring sense of direction. Din tracked doors and twists and turns by habit, but his attention kept sliding to the planes of Fett’s back, the crisp edges of his beskar.

 _He doesn’t have a full_ beskar’gam, Din thought absently, in between noting what looked like a pair of false doors seamed into the wall and a long, dark hallway that must have been a servants’ passage. Fett had a cuirass and gauntlets, had the helmet and a jetpack, but nothing else. He’d said that the armor had been his father’s, and his father had been a foundling. 

_Did his father’s tribe not have much beskar?_ Fett himself was big enough to make good use of a full set of heavy plate, if he wanted. 

_Why doesn’t he want any of that beskar to finish his armor?_

Din didn’t understand. Granted, there was a lot that he didn’t understand these days. Ever since he’d taken the kid’s fob from the Imp on Nevarro, Din had found himself in a galaxy that didn’t make any sense. 

He’d come up in a practical covert. Their concerns had been over food and armor and a safe place to sleep. Some of the older warriors had known the ancient songs and legends from the days before the Purge, but there hadn’t been much use for stories or myths and the _alor_ had discouraged dreaming of Mandalore’s glory days. 

“Our children can’t eat songs,” she had said. “We are hunters, not storytellers.” 

Life had been straightforward. Din hunted and brought back his earnings to split among the covert. The Guild paid well enough. The foundlings got to eat and the injured were cared for and the _Razor Crest_ had always had enough fuel to make it to the next job. 

But then he’d found the kid, and it was as if picking up the kid had shifted Din into an entirely different universe, one that was full of laser swords and strange powers and Mandalorians who showed their faces.

Fett’s refusal to take more beskar for himself wasn’t that odd, compared to the rest of it. 

_At least Fett doesn’t have a laser sword._ That was something Din could hold on to with both hands. Fett didn’t have a laser sword -- a lightsaber, Ahsoka Tano had called them, an odd counterpoint to the darksaber Din apparently had to carry everywhere -- and he didn’t want to reclaim a destroyed planet. He was, aside from the thing with the beskar, about as normal as Din could hope for. 

_He won’t be hard to work with,_ Din reassured himself. Certainly not the most difficult employer Din had ever had. He’d taken a few Black Sun contracts over the years, when Guild pucks had been too infrequent or low-paying. Black Sun loved to underpay or undercut its hunters, at least until Din had set his Black Sun contact a little bit on fire once. After that they’d paid up on time, though Din had still avoided them when he could. 

Fett led Din back to the throne room and muttered a gruff, “Wait here,” pulling Din out of his thoughts. Fett strode into the room, leaving Din to wait awkwardly in the hall, still half-building a map of the palace in his head, though he didn’t leave Din to wait for long. 

Without Fett in it to hold court, the throne room had mostly emptied out. The suns were starting to set outside, orange light slashing through the windows, and the only ones left in the throne room were the Tuskens, the Twi’lek bartender and Fennec. 

Fett went straight for Fennec, who rolled up from her slouch over the bar easily and followed Fett back to Din. When she got close enough, she cocked an eyebrow Din’s way. 

“I told him you wouldn’t just take it,” Fennec said. The fact that she’d seen all of the beskar beneath the palace too made Din’s mouth thin. His temples throbbed. 

“This is not the Way,” he repeated, firmly. 

Fennec didn’t roll her eyes, exactly, but she somehow managed to convey the feeling of rolling her eyes without actually doing it. “What _is_ the Way?” she asked. 

Din stared at her, caught off guard. He’d never been asked that by an _aruetii_ before. 

“Fennec,” Boba said, sounding long-suffering. “Leave it. Mando’s going to be working with us for a while. Be nice.”

“I am being nice,” Fennec muttered, but she subsided, slipping around Boba to head off down the hall in a different direction. Fett tilted his helmet after her. 

“C’mon,” he said. “We’ll talk business upstairs. There’s too many ears down here.” 

“...Alright.” Din didn’t know who Fett could be worried about overhearing, but he didn’t care where they spoke. It didn’t matter if Fett gave Din a job in the throne room or a palace spire or the depths of Jabba’s old treasure rooms. What mattered is that Din would have something to _do._ He’d have something to focus on. 

He let Fett lead again, this time down another hall that sloped gently upwards until it came to a round lift. The lift went up six floors -- Din counted them to stave off the sudden rush of nausea in his gut and spike of pain in his head -- and opened in a long, spare hall that was mostly just windows. 

Jabba’s palace, like the rest of Tatooine, didn’t have windows covered with glass or plexiplate. The windows were really just little more than holes in the wall, carved out and worn smooth to let heat escape and wind lick through the palace’s halls and keep the worst of Tatooine’s oppressive warmth out of the building. This high up, not even the sand was too bad, though sturdy durasteel shutters had been fixed outside each window and could be lowered whenever a sandstorm came through. 

Din paused to look out a window. They were a good ways off the ground, not that heights usually bothered Din, and were crossing a walkway between two of the palace’s round towers.

“Jabba’s personal rooms are one floor up,” Fett explained. His helmet didn’t turn, but Din could feel Fett watching him. He straightened under the attention, determined to hide his discomfort. 

_Pain is good,_ Din told himself firmly. _Pain is a focus._

“But I couldn’t get the smell out,” Fett continued, “so I’m still in my old set of rooms, at the top of this tower here.” He gestured down to the end of the walkway where another lift, this one a bit smaller, waited for them. “Fennec takes the stairs. Don’t know why.” 

“Oh,” Din said, not sure what else he could add. He searched for some words and came up with, “You had rooms here?” 

“The old worm was a regular employer of mine.” Fett’s voice had gone toneless. “He was the highest-paying employer in this sector, and in five others.”

Din nodded. “I contracted here for a few cycles, before I won a place in the Guild,” he said. “I was never offered any rooms, though.” 

Fett made a strange sound that might have been a laugh. “You weren’t missing out on much. When did you run with the Hutts? I would’ve remembered you.” 

Din and Fett would have fought over the highest-paying jobs like massifs over a bone. They would have despised each other. Din was still getting to know Fett, but he knew that much at least. Din smiled. 

“I was young,” he said, reaching back through his memories. “It was back during the Empire days. I was maybe… twenty standard? Twenty-one?” Things had been looser back then. More than one hunter had gone out of the covert at a time because the Empire’s attention had been on breaking places Onderon, Kashyyyk and Lasan. It had been safe to let the young warriors out and about, so long as they all worked different systems. Din’d come to Tatooine looking to make a reputation for himself and had ended up stranded for a few years instead, at least until he’d been able to buy the _Crest_ and track down the covert. 

“You have a full _beskar’gam?_ ” 

Din shook his head. He’d had no status then. “Just this.” He rapped his knuckles against his helmet gently. The metal vibrated, which did nothing for his headache, but Din ignored it. “The rest was all scrap I salvaged in the Dune Sea. Durasteel and corundum, mostly.” 

Fett grunted. “Tusken scrap,” he said.

Din nodded. When he’d finally earned enough money to get off Tatooine and track down the covert, Din’s _alor_ had taken one look at his piecemeal armor and ordered him into the forge. He’d managed to earn her respect by staying alive on Tatooine, keeping to the Creed despite all his time away, but she hadn’t been very impressed with his ability to armor himself. 

They reached the second lift and Fett ushered Din inside, swiping a palm over the keypad. The doors groaned and slid closed and the lift began to climb. Din’s stomach didn’t twist this time. 

“Door’s set to my scans,” Fett explained, when he noticed Din watching him curiously. “The Hutt Syndicate’s been ripping itself up for years, fighting over Jabba’s piece, but they’ll hear about me eventually and come around. Me and Fennec can get up here, but that’s it. We’ll get you added to the scans, if you’re sticking around.” 

“Are you going to join them? The Hutts, I mean.” Din didn’t think that the Hutts would allow a non-Hutt to run a piece of their empire, but stranger things had happened. Bib Fortuna hadn’t been a Hutt, but he’d apparently been left to his own devices until Fett and Fennec had intervened. 

Fett snorted. “No,” he said. 

“That’ll be a fight,” Din observed. 

“We’re ready for a fight,” said Fett, and his voice took on an edge. “Besides, we’ve got you now, don’t we? You can just bring that light cruiser of yours around and send the Hutts running.” 

“It’s not my light cruiser.” Kryze had pretty thoroughly taken over the ship. She and her companions had settled into the bridge like a pack of nesting mynocks, taking great pleasure in hunting down the ship’s remaining Imperials while Din had been in bacta. Din spent most of his time on the light cruiser skulking around in the lower decks, avoiding both Kryze and the med droid. 

Fett made a noncommittal noise. He sounded amused. Din eyed him warily, once again on the back foot, not sure what Fett meant or was thinking. 

“Pity,” was all Fett said. “We could’ve used the firepower.” 

The lift shuddered to a stop and opened again with another swipe of Fett’s hand over the keypad. Din drew back, surprised. 

Fett’s rooms, situated at the top of a tower, were open and airy. The roof was domed and supported by a round, broad pillar in the middle of the room, which housed the lift they had taken, and the room was open on all sides to the air. There were no walls separating Fett’s quarters from the high desert, only long, translucent curtains that caught and billowed in the wind. Fett’s bed was round and halfway recessed into the room’s central pillar. Other furniture -- a dark wooden table, a desk, a stack of metal crates, a workbench -- was scattered around the space. A datapad and an earthen mug were perched on the table. A few sturdy-looking metal beams rose up here and there, forming loose separations between Fett’s work and sleeping spaces and further supporting the ceiling. 

Fett took off his helmet. “Well?” he said, watching Din. “C’mon, Mandalorian, you won’t fall off the edge.” 

Din left the lift cautiously, still staring. He hid a wince at the title -- _Mandalorian._

“Is this… safe?” he asked, looking around. Anybody with a jetpack -- or even a decent set of climbing gear -- could make it up here without any trouble. 

Fett waved a careless hand. “There’s blast doors in the ceiling and sensors all around,” he said. “I can close them if there’s a sandstorm, and if anything bigger than a _junda_ bird comes within a mile the blast doors trigger. Had ‘em installed myself. Cost me two years’ pay, but it’s safe enough.” 

“...Why?” Din had to admit that the view was good. The white bones of Mos Eisley could be seen from one side of the room, far enough away that the city looked quaint and homey instead of dingy and wild. The desert lay all around the palace in shades of yellow and orange and red. The first edges of the Jundland Wastes lay off to the east, a high, flat plateau scored with canyons and cliffs. The Dune Sea rolled north and west, endless and quiet. Din was sure that the nights up here were radiant, the breeze cool. 

A nice view wasn’t worth getting killed over, though, and Din said so. 

Fett only smiled and ran a hand over his head, skimming his scars. “Spent a lot of time in dark, cramped places,” he said. “You know how it is. The _Crest_ wasn’t much bigger than the _Slave._ ” 

That was fair. Din’s entire life had been spent aboard ships or underground, aside from a memorable few years his covert had hidden out in the abandoned treetop villages of Kashyyyk and the months he’d spent on Sorgan with the kid.

“Believe me,” said Fennec, emerging from behind them. The stairs ran up through the central pillar alongside the lift and she emerged as collected as always, unruffled by the several flights she must have climbed to get up here. 

_Those walls have to be thicker than a bantha,_ Din thought, impressed despite his confusion. 

“I’ve told him he’s being careless too,” Fennec continued. “Jabba’s rooms can lock down tighter than an Imperial comms hub.” 

“If I’d wanted to sleep in an Imperial comms hub I would’ve stayed with the _Executor_ on Vader’s payroll,” said Fett, mildly. 

“You said Vader couldn’t afford you.”

“He couldn’t,” Fett said. “And his hospitality wasn’t much better than the sarlaac’s. I like this better. Makes me feel like I’ve still got some _shereshoy._ ”

Din blinked. _Mandalorian,_ he thought, catching the familiar contours of the word. He didn’t know what it meant -- _oy_ was _oya,_ hunt, alive, but the rest of the word was just syllables. Din committed it to memory anyway, saving the sounds, the hard _resh,_ the lift on _oy,_ to turn over later. 

Fennec snorted. “All it would take is one idiot with a pulse rifle and decent aim and you’re a smear on the floor,” she said. 

Fett just shrugged. “That’s why I gave you the biggest pulse rifle.” 

Din let them bicker, not sure he had the right to jump into their -- mostly friendly, from what he could tell -- argument. Instead of joining in, he padded across Fett’s floor to stand at the edge and peered down. 

It was a hell of a view. Vertigo roared in Din’s ears, twisted in his stomach, but he locked his knees and pushed past it. There was no room for weakness here -- Din was on the job. 

_Focus, Mandalorian._ Din swallowed around his nausea and scanned the rooftops for vantage points or weaknesses. Din spotted at least three points where an assassin could manage a direct shot into the room, but when he turned back around, he saw that none of the vantage points would give a clear shot at Fett’s bed. As long as Fett was at least decently alert from anywhere else in the room, it’d be hard to surprise him before he could bring the blast doors down. 

Risking another bout of vertigo, Din craned his head and looked further down. Din could see the palace’s landing bay. Fett’s ship, battered as ever, sat alone on a pad. Din wondered if any of the bays off the landing pad had any ships inside, or if Fett had cleared them all out when he’d taken over. 

“Mando,” Fett said, his voice cutting through Din’s thoughts. Din turned. Fett and Fennec had tabled their argument and were leaning over the workbench, where Fett had pulled up a holodisplay. “C’mere.”

Din obeyed. Fennec shuffled over to make room for Din at the bench and Din peered down at the display, blinking. 

Fett had brought up a map of the Jundland Wastes. When Din leaned over to get a better look, Fett focused the display, narrowing in on a web of canyons. 

“Who am I hunting?” Din asked, studying the map. He knew the canyons well enough. They were sacred to the Tuskens. No one tribe could claim them as their sole territory -- all tribes were permitted to hunt there, for both food and settlers. 

“Right to the point, huh?” Fennec muttered, half-smiling. Din ignored her and focused on Fett, who was watching him with calm, dark eyes. Something about his gaze made Din want to stand very straight, like a warrior presenting himself for inspection. He lifted his chin and hooked his hands into his belt self-consciously, not sure what else to do with them. 

Fett looked Din up and down. “You sure you’re up for a hunt?” he asked. “How’s the head? And the arm? That droid showed me your scans -- you took some damage.” 

Din scowled. “I’m fine,” he said. His wrist ached sharply, but Din ignored it. The darktrooper has crushed his right arm, cracked three of Din’s ribs and done its best to smash his head in. The beskar had staved off the worst of the damage -- Din had gone back to that hallway after he’d come out of bacta, had seen the hole he’d left in the wall. If he’d been in durasteel, he’d be dead. As it was, his right hand was weaker now and hurt with the slightest change in the weather, but Fett didn’t need to know that. The beskar gauntlet kept his arm straight and his aim steady. That was what mattered.

Fett studied Din for a moment, unreadable. Then he nodded. 

“You’re after a _sleemo_ named Zhalto,” Fett said, switching the display over to a hovering face. Din blinked and committed it to memory -- Zhalto was a Zygerrian, middle-aged and sun-weathered, with angular features and flat, cold eyes. Din nodded to himself. He’d hunted Zygerrians before. As a rule they were slippery but overconfident. 

“Who’s he to you?” Din asked, though it didn’t really matter.

“A Hutt spy, we think.” Fett tilted his chin at Fennec, who said, “I’m pretty sure, anyway. Never saw him hanging around Bib Fortuna, but when Jabba was in power Zhalto’d come planetside every few months, bringing things from Hutt space. Slaves, mostly, but information too. He gave Jabba the names of at least three contracts.” 

“Contracts?” Din asked. 

Fennec looked at him. “People Jabba had me kill,” she said. 

Din winced, grateful his helmet hid the motion. “Right.” 

It wasn’t that Din was… uncomfortable, with the idea of wetwork. He’d had to kill more than a few of his own targets over the years, and if Cara hadn’t needed Gideon alive, Din would have killed him without a thought. Bounty hunters and assassins tended to circle in similar orbits -- that was probably how Fennec and Fett knew each other, now that Din took a second to think about it -- and while their work didn’t _overlap,_ exactly, hunting and contract killing were similar enough. 

_I’ve just never really done it, I guess._ Killing bounties who tried to run or tried to overpower Din’s ship was one thing. He’d had plenty of practice putting down mutinies. But he’d never taken a puck, looked at it and thought, _This one won’t come back alive._

“He stuck his nose in here a few days ago,” Fett said, switching the holodisplay back to the map of the canyons. “Sniffing around, asking Noora and Ushib questions. Ushib caught him wandering around a part of the palace he shouldn’t’ve been in. She tried to hold him, but he stole a speeder and hit the sands.” 

“You think he’s going to report back to the Hutts what he’s seen here?” 

“I do,” said Fett. “He can’t get off-world through Mos Eisley -- I’ve put his face out at all the ports.” 

“What if he tries to bribe his way off?” Mos Eisley’s portmasters were notoriously easy to bribe. 

“I’ve promised to triple anything Zhalto offers to turn him away,” Fett said. “Fortuna was an idiot. He ran the business into the ground but didn’t bother poking around Jabba’s stores. There’s plenty of peggats around. Zhalto tried Mos Eisley two days ago and couldn’t get portage off-planet. Last any of my people saw of him, he was heading for the Wastes.”

“So where’s Zhalto going?” Din murmured, more to himself than anything. “If he’s going through the canyons he’ll be making for Mos Espa. Anchorhead doesn’t have a spaceport.” 

“I don’t have any boots on the ground in Mos Espa yet,” Fett said. “Fortuna didn’t have much here by way of useful employees. It was mostly just _sheb’urcyine_.” 

Din smiled. He did know that word.

“Fortuna’s people more or less cleared out once we got here,” Fennec put in, propping herself up on her elbows. “The ones we didn’t shoot, anyway. A few hunters and guards we know from the old days have turned back up and are willing to work with us, but not enough to post outside the palace.” 

Din nodded. He turned the problem over in his hands. “Zhalto could disappear in Mos Espa,” he said. “But only if he makes it there. The canyons will be crawling with Tuskens. The bantha are moving, and it’s Tusken hunting season.” 

“‘S why it’s best you go, instead of Fennec or me,” said Fett. “You’re less likely to get shot by some young fool trying to prove himself a blooded warrior.” 

“You’re a friend of the Tuskens too,” Din said, though privately he agreed. 

“I’m a friend of one tribe,” said Fett. He gestured at Dn, at the beskar and the spear and the tattered cloak. “Still _ghuy’ra. You’re_ known to just about all of them, now. Word of the Great Dragon’s spread.” 

Din inclined his head. That was fair. “I can get him,” he said. 

Fett’s dark eyes shone. Din stood even straighter, pleased. “Good. Take anything you want out of the armory. Not that you need much.” 

“You want him alive?” Din asked, testing the boundaries. He hadn’t put any limitations on his offer to work for Fett. Din would kill for that beskar, if he had to. It was the Way.

“Yeah, ‘s long as he doesn’t give you too much trouble. I want to know what he knows, and what the rest of the Syndicate’s up to.”

Din nodded. He could manage that. The Jundland Wastes were close enough. “You got a speeder I can borrow? The one I brought isn't big enough for two.” 

“Take what you want,” said Fett, with a careless wave of his hand. “What’s mine is yours.” 

Expression safe underneath his helmet, Din let himself roll his eyes. That wasn’t true. Fett and Din were allies, but Din wasn’t of Fett’s tribe. Still, borrowing a speeder wouldn’t cost Din much. He still had credits in his pocket, and if the cost of the speeder and the fuel was more than he had on him, Fett could take it out of his bounty. 

“Shouldn’t take more than a few days,” Din said, checking the position of the suns, now swung so low over Tatooine’s horizon that the whole desert had become a sea of fire. With a decent speeder Din could make well into the canyons before the moons set in the morning. 

“We’ll look for you,” Fett said. “Good hunting, Mandalorian.” 

“Djarin,” Din said, before his mind could catch up with his tongue. _Mandalorian_ wasn’t right, not anymore. 

Fett, to his credit, only nodded, his expression opening for just a moment before it closed off again. “Djarin,” he said. Hearing his own name in Fett’s mouth made Din’s breath stutter. It had been a long time since an ally had said his name. “ _Oya_ , Djarin.” 

Din dipped his head, accepting the job, and made for the lift. Fett and Fennec went back to discussing their business. Din hoped to slip out down the lift and disappear, his head whirling between the beskar in the vaults and the job that lay before him, but when he got to the lift and swiped a hand over the keypad, the door wouldn’t open. 

Din closed his eyes briefly. _Right,_ he thought. _The door’s coded to Fett, not me._

That was fine. There were more ways out of this room than the elevator. Din craned around, saw that Fett and Fennec were still busy over the holodisplay and grinned to himself. He took four long strides to the edge of Fett’s room, the desert breeze stirring his cloak, and stepped out into empty air before his vertigo could catch up to him and throw him off balance. 

The heartbeat of suspended gravity just before a fall was Din’s favorite. He’d loved the feeling of momentary weightlessness, even as a child, and when the teachers in the Fighting Corps had brought out jetpacks and started to train the foundlings in the Way of the Rising Phoenix, Din had taken to it like a silik lizard to the sands. 

For a thin sliver of time he hung there off the edge of Fett’s palace, the whole of the desert spread out before him, and then gravity took over and Din dropped like a stone, wind rushing past him. An alert flashed across his visor. 

Fifteen years ago Din might have waited until the last possible moment to engage the jetpack, racing gravity to the ground. 

He was a bit too old to be playing games like that now, though, and the whiplash would likely make his back ache. He was on a job, anyway, and he probably didn’t have much time before the intermittent nausea kicked back in. 

Din engaged his jetpack at a responsible, reasonable height, this jetpack a gift from Axe Woves, blue and grey instead of the old silver one that had been left behind on Tython, before the next roof could get too close. He regained height easily, rolling in the air to check behind him. The blast doors around Fett’s room had slammed shut, as Fett had said they would, and now Fett’s tower was indistinguishable from the rest. 

_Well, at least the security system works._

Din spared a brief moment to wonder what Fett’s face looked like -- if Fennec was laughing -- before he focused again. 

Din dropped down between another pair of towers, aiming for the landing pad. The pad’s sole attendant, a dried-out, sour-looking Nuxan, didn’t so much as twitch as Din made his approach and landed solidly on the ground, sand swirling at his feet. 

The lack of guards and attendants made sense now. If Bib Fortuna had really been as bad at running Jabba’s business as Fett had claimed, most of Jabba’s more competent lackeys would have long since moved on. Criminal enterprises grew in the Outer Rim like kahel cave fungus grew in the dark. Any half-decent guard, pickpocket, slicer and thief could find their way into half a dozen other syndicates without any trouble. All Fett and Fennec had to work with now were the dregs who couldn’t make it with another crew and the few who’d come back once they’d heard that Fortuna had died. 

_And me._ Din wasn’t sure what that made him, a dreg or a loyal massif. He decided not to think about it too deeply. 

“Hey, Nuxan,” Din called gruffly, making sure to stay far enough back that his air filters wouldn’t pick up the Nuxan’s species-specific stench. “You have a speeder bike or a transport I could hire? Something big enough for at least two?” 

The Nuxan looked up, blinked a slow, double-lidded blink, and flopped a limp hand towards a bay around the starboard side of _Slave II._ “ _Chess haku uba naga. Soong alla junkie._ ” 

Din sighed. “Of course it is. Thanks.” 

True to the Nuxan’s word, all of the speeder bikes in storage were basically scrap, most of them older than the Empire and rusted through to bare wires. None of the land transports would engage, though there was a BARC two-seater that was decent enough tucked away in a corner. Din managed to get it to rumble to life after a few kicks and choice curses. The Nuxan didn’t look up as Din swung a leg over the speeder and eased it out into the sands. 

He was out in the desert before long, the palace shrinking in the distance, the shadows deepening as the suns vanished and took the last purple light of the day with them. 

Things had always made sense to Din in the desert. The suns disappeared and night fell over Tatooine like a hammer, the temperature plummeting so fast that the wiring inside Din’s beskar whined as it shifted from cooling to warming. 

Tatooine’s daylight creatures, bantha and dewbacks and broad-winged _junda_ birds, vanished, retreating to their caves and burrows for the night. The nocturnal creatures began to move. Anooba yipped in the distance, their packs gathering together to begin the hunt. Razorbacks trundled along among the dunes. Canyon krayts, much smaller than the great dragon that had terrorized Mos Pelgo, yowled and shrieked. 

Din had always liked the order of the Great Dune Sea. Tatooine appeared wild and chaotic, a storm of criminal enterprises and desperate people and fearsome raiders, but really, once one made planetfall and stood in the sand, everything made _sense._

Everything had its place. Predators hunted and prey was eaten. Bantha moved in herds to protect their young and anooba packs grew to meet the challenge. 

Even the Tuskens had their place. They were strong and brutal and Din had been very, very lucky to have been given _alain’ah_ by the White Bantha all those years ago instead of a sharp whack in the head, but the Tuskens had their place too. Nothing in the Dune Sea was made to support a settled population. Only stubborn humans tried. Tuskens followed the law of the wind, moving from sand dune to sand dune, following water as it moved through its secret places underground and bantha as they wandered from scrub to scrub.

As the moons rose and his speeder skimmed across the desert, Din’s thoughts grew clearer and sharper. His body came alive, the persistent headache fading to a dull throb behind his ear, the weariness in his limbs receding. The stars lit up the desert as well as any sun and the wind died, the sand clearing and revealing the way.

Din’s visor picked up bantha tracks, deep impressions in the sand left by broad feet. A small herd had come through here, headed for the canyonlands. Din nodded to himself and angled his speeder after them. 

There were no roads in the Jundland Wastes. Roads didn’t last long on Tatooine. But the bantha knew the safe paths into the canyons, the route taught year after year, and Din knew that as long as he followed the bantha, he’d make it to the canyons safely. 

Making it _out_ of the canyons would be a different challenge, but Din had a while yet before he had to worry about that. 

_Zhalto first,_ he said to himself, skimming the sands. _Then an escape plan._

It _was_ Tusken hunting season. Despite what he’d told Fett, Din planned to tread carefully. The White Bantha had taken him in and looked after him but Tuskens weren’t one unified people -- the friendship of one tribe could very well have earned Din the enmity of another. The Sun Rock were his allies too, Din supposed -- killing a greater krayt tended to band people together, Tusken, settler and Mandalorian all -- but there were as many Tusken tribes in the desert as there were herds of bantha. 

_If I’m lucky, I should be fine. One lone man in beskar is not an appealing target._ Din was only lucky sometimes, but he didn’t plan to spend long in the canyons. 

_Just need to find Zhalto and get out,_ Din thought. 

He followed the bantha tracks to the first towering jut of red rock. According to the Tuskens the canyons were as old as Tatooine itself, formed when the rivers ran above ground instead of underneath it. Din could believe it; despite their height, the canyons were smooth and gentle, their walls worn down by water and wind, sinuous and flowing like a river. 

Din knocked his bike down to its lowest setting, sacrificing speed for silence. The old BARC rattled but the engine quieted, muffled by the high winds above. 

_Good,_ Din thought. As soon as he got through the mouth of the canyon, a complete and total darkness fell. The shape of the rock blocked out most of the stars and the moons. His visor adjusted automatically, filtering everything through night vision. 

Din found the bantha tracks again, the herd moving in single file now, and started off after them.

He was careful to scan the walls and cliffs every time he rounded a curve. Zhalto wouldn’t know to climb the canyon walls and take shelter in the kirik-fly caves pocked twenty or thirty feet up off the ground, but raiders would. 

Din stopped a few times to check for signs of Zhalto. He didn’t find any tracks, but he did find fresh carbon burns on the canyon walls, a smear of speeder exhaust, a discarded canteen. 

_He’s armed,_ Din thought to himself. _On a speeder, and down at least one canteen of water._ The marks could have been made by another traveler through the canyons, but they were fresh and most locals knew to avoid the Wastes during hunting season. No one lived in the canyons, not even Tuskens. Years ago Din’d heard of a sorcerer who had made the canyons his home, but that was just a cantina tale. There wasn’t anything for most sentients to _eat_ in the canyons, aside from migrating bantha, the odd bladeback and canyon krayts, all three of which tended to resent being hunted, and kirik-flies made the place unbearable for anyone without beskar and a thick _kute._

 _No, odds are this is my bounty,_ Din thought, running his fingertips over the carbon marks. _What was he shooting at?_ There were no bodies, Tusken, animal or otherwise. No blood, either. It was as if Zhalto had come roaring through here shooting at empty air. 

_Strange._

Din climbed back onto the BARC and followed the canyon as it wound and weft its way through the desert. Not much grew down here, just a few tufts of sawgrass and stubborn old _cedru_ trees. A canyon krayt’s haunting call rose up from somewhere off in the distance. 

Din paused to scan the rocks again, his thermal sensors flickering. Krayts were cold-blooded and hard to spot, especially if they held still, but Din was reasonably sure there weren’t any nearby. Canyon krayts were easier to handle than a greater krayt, anyway. 

He checked the straps holding his spear to his back anyway, just to make sure that they’d release smoothly if he needed to grab the spear in a hurry. 

Din followed the marks on the canyon walls. He couldn’t figure out what Zhalto had been shooting at. The marks were regular and constant; there was a new burn scored into the canyons every fifty or sixty feet. 

_Was he trying to mark a path?_

The canyons did branch off now and then, opening into a maze of other gaps and crevices. Din had been taught to see which gaps were true paths and which were false trails that would dead-end suddenly, crevices that would narrow and narrow until an unwary traveler got trapped trying to claw their way out. 

_But does Zhalto know how to see?_

The Tuskens who’d rescued Din all those years ago had taught him to read the desert. Bantha wouldn’t move down crevices that were too narrow, and _cedru_ trees only grew above pockets of water. 

Now that Din knew what to look for, he saw Zhalto’s reasoning. He had been shooting the walls to map out the canyons. If he’d been here for a few days, Zhalto was likely starting to panic. He’d gotten turned around, somehow, and instead of finding his way to Mos Espa, he’d only found himself trapped, so now he was scoring the walls to help himself see where he’d already been. 

Din snorted. _That’s not wise._ Zhalto should’ve just shot flares into the sky or painted himself with bantha blood. Anything with eyes would be able to track him now. 

Still, Zhalto’s carelessness made Din’s job easier, so Din coaxed the speeder a bit faster, confident that he was now on Zhalto’s trail. 

The suns had fully risen again, thin shafts of light piercing the canyons, when Din found Zhalto’s speeder. 

Din was traveling slow enough that sharp turns didn’t pose much of a danger, but Zhalto had clearly been traveling too fast. He’d taken a turn too sharply, too quickly, and had found himself face to face with a _cedru_ tree without any time to turn aside. 

_Cedru_ trees were old, strong and made to withstand the extremities of Tatooine’s deserts. Zhalto’s speeder hadn’t stood a chance. The front end of it was still _in_ the tree, technically, buried in the _cedru’_ s red trunk. The air was heavy with the smell of burnt metal and sap. The other half of the speeder was scattered across the canyon floor. Fuel had spilled, shiny and thick, and when Din hopped off his own speeder to take a closer look, he saw blood on the sand too. He stripped off a glove to touch a droplet. It was tacky. Zhalto wasn’t far. 

He scanned the whole scene, piecing it together. The Zygerrian had come around the corner too quickly, hit the tree and wrecked his speeder. Zhalto’d been flung from the wreckage -- Din could see where his body had hit the sand. He’d been wounded. There was a trail of blood leading deeper into the canyon, into the shade. 

Din smiled, grimly. _Got you,_ he thought. 

Din racked the BARC down to its lowest setting and set off again, skimming a foot or so off the canyon floor so he didn’t lose the trail in the dust. He checked the positions of the suns. 

_Nearly noon._ Din rounded a corner, speeder first, and his instincts flared. He ducked. A blaster bolt whizzed past his head. 

_Found you._ Din, rather than slowing down and letting Zhalto get another shot off, accelerated. Blasters shot straight; he knew, more or less, where Zhalto would be. 

A reddish blur dove out of the way of Din’s speeder. Din killed the engine and leapt off before the BARC had stopped moving, drawing his own blaster. He hit the sand lightly, kicking up dust, and ducked again when another bolt of red light went whizzing past his eye. 

Din took half a heartbeat to get the shape of the battlefield in his mind’s eye, and then Din moved. 

Zygerrians were taller than humans, usually, and lean as vine tigers, and ones with combat training were fast, but Din was faster. He focused on the reddish shape and lunged; pound for pound he was heavier than the Zygerrian, bolstered by his armor, and Zhalto hadn’t been prepared to be tackled. 

Zhalto yelped and toppled backwards, flailing. He managed to hold onto his blaster but not his headcovering -- a roll of cloth made to shield sensitive eyes from Tatooine’s harsh sunlight fell away, and Zhalto threw his other hand over his eyes with a yowl of pain. 

Din’s momentum carried them both into the sand. Zhalto got one of his pawed feet between him and Din and kicked. Din’s cuirass took the blow and spread the force of it out across his chest, beskar ringing, but Din was still shoved away. He rolled with it, letting Zhalto’s energy save some of his own, and came up on one knee. 

Zhalto was staggering to his feet too, one hand still over his eyes, the other waving a blaster around. His fur was thick with sand. Din braced himself and aimed a gauntlet, ready to rope Zhalto down. 

The hairs on the back of Din’s neck stood up, and behind the Zygerrian, he saw a flash of silver. It was only a glimmer, a moment of reflected sunlight, but Din would know the shine of beskar anywhere. 

Din stared after it, surprised. _Beskar?_ He thought, searching the shadows for another glimmer. _Here? But who_ \--? 

The half-second of distraction cost Din. Zhalto tore his hand away from his eyes, got a good look at Din and swung the end of his blaster down with all the force he could muster, aiming for the vulnerable gap between the end of Din’s gauntlet and the beskar plate that backed his glove. 

Zhalto’s aim was pretty accurate. 

Din’s mind went white with pain. He might have shouted but he didn’t hear it over the roar between his ears. Only instinct kept Din from rearing backwards and giving Zhalto the opening he needed to lunge for the idling BARC -- Zhalto lunged straight into a faceful of beskar and Din lashed out with his other hand, catching Zhalto by the throat. 

Zhalto struggled, blaster falling as he brought his own hands up to claw at Din, who forced himself up on both feet, but Zhalto’s hands, ending in Zygerrian claws, only sparked as they scraped Din’s gauntlets. 

Din followed through like a Mandalorian. He brought his head back and snapped it forward, slamming the ridge of his helmet into Zhalto’s nose. Blood sprayed. Zhalto buckled, stunned. Din let him slump down into the sands. He tucked his injured arm close to his chest and gasped for breath, blinking furiously to clear his vision. 

“Dank _karking_ ferrick _,_ ” he hissed, once he could speak without screaming. 

_If he broke my arm again, I’m going to kill him._ Din had just gotten the med droid to leave off poking and prodding him. He didn’t want any more metal screwed into his arm either -- metal should be _outside_ the body, armoring and protecting it. 

Once his mind cleared a little, Din forced himself to uncurl and curl his fingers. Pain jolted through him, making nausea claw at the bottom of his ribs, but he _could_ move his fingers, which was good. He rotated his wrist and swore in Huttese, then in Tusken and Rodian for good measure. 

_Sprained, I think._

Zhalto stirred weakly, coming to. Din scowled and kicked him. Zhalto stopped moving. 

_My own damn fault,_ Din thought. He checked the curve in the canyon again. Whatever he’d seen that had distracted him was gone. He should be kicking himself, not Zhalto. The desert often lied; sun and heat were tricksters, always up to mischief. A sprained wrist was the least that could have happened. 

Din gave himself another few seconds to feel sore and old and sorry for himself, then he shook off the pain and the frustration both and focused on the task at hand. 

Zhalto wouldn’t get the opportunity to strike at Din again. 

Din flipped the still-stunned Zygerrian over and bound his hands behind his back. Then he went through Zhalto’s pockets, discarding anything that could be used as a weapon. Zhalto didn’t have much. A busted commlink, a vibroknife in his boot, a mostly-empty canteen of water, a few peggats. Din kept the commlink for Fett, even if it was broken, drank the water and tossed the vibroknife away. It would make some Tusken happy, Din was sure. 

By the time Zhalto finally stirred again, moaning weakly, Din’s wrist throbbed but was manageable. He breathed through it until the pain had faded to an ever-present but steady hum, background noise instead of a red, raw alarm blaring through his nerves.

“Get up,” Din said, flatly. 

Zhalto moaned again. 

“Get. Up,” said Din. He cocked his blaster and leveled it at the Zygerrian. “I won’t ask a third time.” 

“I’ll pay triple what Fett is,” Zhalto said, rising to his knees. “Credits, spice, slaves, you name it, I’ll pay your price.”

Din shot him in the shoulder. 

He didn’t usually go out of his way to rough up his bounties. There was almost never any point. A bounty was a job, nothing more, and it was unseemly to harm those in his power. Dishonorable. 

But Din didn’t have any honor, not anymore, and his wrist hurt, and he didn’t like slavers. Zhalto’s scream was satisfying. 

“I can’t be bought,” Din said. He cocked his blaster again, the message clear. 

Zhalto staggered to his feet. His eyes were slitted like a loth-cat’s, wide with pain and fear. He didn’t offer Din any more money. 

“Get on the back of the speeder,” Din said. “If you try and run, I’ll shoot you in the knees next.” 

Zhalto didn’t argue. 

Something pricked at the edge of Din’s awareness, a warning. He stilled. _We’re being watched._

“Don’t move,” he told Zhalto, and slowly turned around, flicking his visor to thermal imaging. 

High up on the ridge stood a Tusken raider. 

The canyons were too shadowed and the suns too bright for Din to see anything that might have identified the raider as a friend or an enemy. Tusken robes were all more or less the same, but _gaderffii_ were as unique to individual warriors as _beskar’gam_ was to Mandalorians, and _gaderffii_ were just as often adorned with carvings or marks that showed a Tusken’s tribe and status.

“Stay behind me,” Din said, shifting so that Zhalto was protected by Din’s beskar. 

“They’ll kill you just as easily as they will me,” Zhalto hissed, but he did as he was told. Getting shot again was probably preferable to being dragged to a raider camp. 

The Tusken raider watched them impassively. 

“Don’t move,” Din repeated. His heat sensors picked up three more signatures hiding among the rocks. “Tuskens hunt in groups.” 

Moving slowly, Din raised his hands so the Tusken could see them and made the sign for [ _tuskra_ ](https://www.signingsavvy.com/search/family). He winced behind his helmet as the motion jarred his wrist, but he was pretty sure, now, that his wrist wasn’t broken. 

The raider on the ridge watched for a moment, still as a statue. Din didn’t see any rifle or blaster on him, just the brutal point of a _gaderffii_ over the raider’s shoulder, but he wouldn’t be surprised if one of the heat signatures hiding among the rocks was a sniper. 

Finally, after a long, tense moment, the raider raised his own hands so Din could see them and made the broad, exaggerated signs for _Which tribe?_

 _White Bantha,_ Din replied. He hesitated, then added, _I am a friend to Sun Rock too._ Din’s knowledge of the intercomplexities of Tusken tribal politics was about fifteen standard years out of date, but he hoped that White Bantha and Sun Rock had more allied tribes and enemy ones. 

The Tusken was still for another moment. _Tuskra,_ he signed back, accepting Din’s claim.

Din sighed in relief. “Get on the back of my speeder,” Din said to Zhalto. “Don’t try to run. If you do, you’ll be shot.” 

“That raider doesn’t have a blaster,” Zhalto said, some of his confidence returning now that he had realized that Din knew enough Tusken to negotiate for their safety. 

“No,” Din agreed, “but the snipers in the rocks do, and you’ve trespassed. You’ve hurt one of their sacred trees. That Raider on the ridge is a blooded warrior. His honor demands that he hunt you down for damaging a _cedru_ tree.”

“So why’s he letting you walk out of here, then?” the Zygerrian challenged. 

Din looked at him. “Because I am a Tusken,” he said. It wasn’t true, not really, but it was worth it to see Zhalto blanch. 

“But -- you’re Mandalorian,” Zhalto blustered. 

“There’s not as much of a difference as you think,” Din said, which was true. Din wasn’t a Mandalorian anymore either, but Zhalto wouldn’t understand what _dar’manda_ meant, and Din was tired of hearing Zhalto speak anyway. “Now get on the speeder before I decide the Tuskens can have you.” 

The prospect of falling into Tusken hands shut Zhalto up. He climbed onto the back of the BARC without any more complaints. Din tore a few strips off Zhalto’s discarded headpiece and used them to tie Zhalto’s legs to the speeder, to make sure he wouldn’t try and jump off on the ride back to Fett’s. Bounty secured, Din turned his attention back to the raider, who still stood watching from the ridge. 

“They’ve been on your trail for a while,” Din said. He kept watching the Tusken as he slowly climbed into the pilot’s seat. “If Fett decides to let you go, leave Tatooine and don't ever come back. Tuskens don’t forget.” 

Zhalto was silent. They both knew that Fett probably wasn’t going to let him go. 

Din started the speeder and eased it back the way he’d come. The raider watched them go, still as stone, until the canyon turned and he was lost from sight. 

Din felt Zhalto shift behind him, moving his legs to test the strength of the ties.

“Don’t even think about it,” Din said. “They’ll follow us out of the canyons. If you try and run for it, they will shoot you, and I’ll leave you to them.” 

“Fett wants my information,” Zhalto argued. 

Din shrugged. “He wants to make sure you’re not a problem. If I leave you with the Tuskens, I know you won’t be a problem ever again.”

Zhalto shut up again and didn’t give Din any more trouble as they left the Jundland Wastes. The trip went faster now that Din wasn’t scouring the dust for tracks. No other raiders popped up on Din’s visor and they made it back out into the open desert without further trouble, Fett’s palace wavering in the distance like a mirage. 

Din picked up speed. He was eager to turn Zhalto over and be done with the whole day. His arm hurt. 

The same Nuxan was on duty at the landing pad when Din finally brought the speeder in, the suns beginning to set, and Din allowed himself to feel a flash of pride. 

_One day,_ he thought. He’d worked faster than he’d initially thought. 

Din didn’t bother to check in with the Nuxan. He parked the speeder where he’d found it, noting the fuel gage, and swung down, getting a good grip on the back of Zhalto’s neck as he did. He cut the ties and hauled the Zygerrian to his feet. Zhalto was stiff underneath Din’s hand, shoulders up, but he was past fighting. Fett’s palace closed around both of them like a vise. 

Din kept a hand on Zhalto as he steered the Zygerrian through the palace. Zhalto became tenser and tenser, every step stiff and jerky, but there wasn’t anything he could do, not even as Din shoved him down the wide, flat steps and into the throne room. 

Instead of Fett sprawled across the throne, Fennec was waiting, perched on one of the throne’s arms like she owned it, a blaster in pieces in her lap. She looked up when Din entered and smiled like a nuxu catching sight of its favorite meal. 

“That was fast,” she said. 

There were more people in the throne room this time. A band played quietly in a corner, the tune a little brighter than it had been when Fett had held court, and there were more sentients gathered around the bar. Conversation hushed as Din walked in. 

Din gave Zhalto another shove, sending the Zygerrian stumbling up to the throne. 

Fennec turned her attention to Zhalto. “Welcome back,” she said. “He give you any trouble, Djarin?” 

“Some,” Din admitted, wishing that Fennec hadn’t said his name. His wrist still ached where Zhalto’d brought his blaster down on it. _I’ll have to get used to it. They can’t call me Mando anymore._ “Nothing I couldn’t handle.”

“Our employer’s done with business for today,” Fennec told Zhalto, putting her blaster back together without needing to look as she did it. Every piece made a satisfying _click_ as it snapped together. “So you’ll just have to make do with our hospitality for the night. Ay-Two, Zero, why don’t you escort our guest to his rooms for the night?”

A massive, bare-chested human man and a narrow, spindly-looking droid peeled away from the bar and nodded at Fennec. The man hooked a hand under Zhalto’s arm and the pair hauled him out of the throne room, down a small, dark hallway that, if Din’s memory held, led down into Jabba’s old dungeons. 

Fennec cocked an eyebrow at Din. “That _was_ fast,” she said. “How hard did he fight?”

“Hard enough, until some raiders showed up,” Din said. “Then he came quietly.”

“Did the raiders give you any trouble?” 

Din shook his head. 

“You need med bay?”

He shook his head again, irritation flickering in his chest. 

Fennec finished her blaster. “How about dinner?” she said. “I’ll tell Boba you’re back while you’re eating.”

“Dinner’s fine,” Din allowed. He hadn’t eaten on the job, and he relaxed at the mention of Fett. Fett would hear that Din had done what he’d been told and would bring a few beskar ingots as payment. 

Din didn’t know what he’d do from there -- push Fett to give him another job? Go out to Mos Pelgo and see if Vanth had any spacecraft? Bring the beskar back to Kryze and the light cruiser, to stockpile for whenever they found other Mandalorians? -- but food was a good first step. 

_Then sleep, maybe._ Din could probably force himself to sleep here in the palace. It would be safer than renting a room somewhere in Mos Eisley, anyway. He needed to look after his injuries, and he only wanted to do that in private. 

Fennec nodded. “Noora’s got a menu,” she said, gesturing at the Twi’lek managing the bar. “She’ll set you up. You can eat in the same room as last time. Want me to watch the door?”

“No,” Din said, shaking his head. “You’ve -- you’re busy.” 

Fennec rolled her eyes, but didn’t push him on it. Her attention was stolen away by the human and the droid -- Ay-Two and Zero, though Din wasn’t sure which was which -- returning from the dungeons. 

Din made his way over to the bar. The others gathered around it cleared out of his way instinctively, though their chatter didn’t stop. Noora, a Twi’lek with blue skin and long, tattooed lekku, smiled at Din. “What’ll it be?” she asked. 

“Food,” Din said. 

Noora laughed. “We have that. What do you want?” 

“Whatever’s still warm is fine,” Din said. He reached into his _kute_ for some credits, but Noora shook her head. 

“You don’t pay,” she explained. “The boss explained it. You want to eat in private?”

Din nodded. Tension spiked in his belly. “I can pay,” he tried, but Noora shook her head again. “The boss was clear,” she said. “And he’s scarier than you, sweetheart.” 

Din twitched. He didn’t think he’d ever been called _sweetheart_ before, and he didn’t think he liked it, either. But he didn’t want to get Noora in trouble with Fett, if Fett had ordered her not to take payment from Din, so Din only held his hands up and left, making his way for the little conference room off to the side where he’d eaten last time. 

The room was empty. Din closed the door behind him, wishing despite what he’d told Fennec that it had a lock, and waited. 

After a few moments, there was a soft _chime_ noise, and a panel set into the wall sprang open. The panel was maybe the size of a spanner. Waiting inside it was a plate of chuba stew, rich and steaming, alongside fluffy glass rice and another cup of water. 

Din took the food carefully and waited until the panel closed before he took off his helmet. He ate less ravenously this time. Chuba stew wasn’t as spicy as Tusken food, let along _tiingilaar,_ but it was filling, the kind of food a solider would eat to keep his strength up, and the taste was mild enough that Din could stomach it. 

He forced himself to clear his plate. His body needed the nutrients, if he was going to get back into fighting strength and keep working for Fett. 

Din finally pushed the empty plate away, drained his cup of water, and reached for his helmet again, intending to rejoin Fennec in the throne room and get a better read on Fett’s court, when he was stopped by a faint sound. 

Din frowned. 

His hearing wasn’t the best anymore. Too many years of getting knocked around -- and caught in explosions -- had left him with a faint, near-constant ringing in his ears. The auditory sensors in his helmet helped filter that out and pick up ambient noise, but without his helmet on the low, constant whine tended to drown out anything too quiet. 

But he listened harder, tilting his head a bit and pressing a hand over one ear to muffle the buzz, and heard the sound again. It _was_ faint, but Din had heard it. A muffled, fleshy _thump,_ the unmistakable sound of someone being struck, followed by a cry of pain. 

Din’s heart rate spiked, his weariness vanishing. 

_Someone is being hurt,_ he thought. _Is it Fett?_ Fennec was, as far as Din could tell, in charge of the palace’s guards. She’d been sitting in the throne like nothing was wrong, but if there weren’t enough guards to cover the palace, would she even know if an assassin or a Hutt enforcer had snuck in? 

Jabba had ruled this palace longer than Fett had been alive. His people would know ways in and out of the palace that Fett just didn’t. 

Din tugged his helmet back on, plate forgotten, and tuned his auditory sensors to their highest setting. When he heard the sound of something flat and heavy striking flesh again, it was clearer.

Din followed it without thinking. He switched the safety on his blaster off. The sounds were regular, almost rhythmic, punctuated by human cries of pain. Din picked up the pace, loping down the hall, until he reached the last door, which was closed. 

Din paused and listened hard; there was a _crack,_ sharp and heavy, and another muffled sound of pain. He didn’t know how many people were in the room, what their positions were or what they wanted from Fett, but Din was still in his beskar. He was fairly confident that he could handle it. 

He opened the door, and then Din froze like he’d been cast in carbonite. 

He didn’t understand what he was seeing. The picture was clear enough -- there was Fett, out of beskar and wearing his usual black, Tusken-style robe, and there was another man standing upright, palms pressed flat against the wall, stripped to the waist. The shirtless man’s back was red and striped, just beginning to bruise around his shoulders, and as Din watched he saw why. Fett, his attention entirely focused on the second man, drew his arm back, a long, wide-tailed whip trailing in his grip, and struck. The whip cracked against man’s back and a new red line bloomed a moment later. The man moaned. 

It was the moan that made Din realize he shouldn’t be watching. It wasn’t a moan of pain, or it was but it was more than pain. Whatever this was, whatever the shirtless man had done to get Fett to hit him, it was personal.

Din tore his eyes away like he’d been burned, blushing underneath his helmet. He must have made some sort of sound of his own, a hiss of surprise or shock, because the shirtless man didn’t look up, but Fett did. 

Fett’s eyes were as black as the night sky. His expression opened, confusion and surprise flickering across his face, but Din didn’t wait to see if his expression would shift to outrage. 

He uprooted himself from the floor and fled. 

Din was halfway down the hall before he could force himself to slow down. A tactical retreat was one thing but he didn’t want to run like a coward, even if he didn’t understand what he’d seen. 

His mind raced. Those marks on the kneeling man’s back would bruise. Din knew it instinctively. They’d deepen, turn blue and purple and black, and the man would be able to feel them every time he moved, every time he stretched his back or rolled his shoulders. If he wore any kind of armor at all, he’d feel it every time the armor pressed against his back. He’d only have to move a little, shift a bit, to remember everything --

 _No,_ Din told himself, dragging his mind away. _No, that’s_ \-- _that’s not why Fett was doing that._

Pain, Din had always been taught, was a focus. It informed the warrior of how he’d failed and instructed him in how he could fight better next time. Pain was a tool, but it wasn’t a tool to be intentionally sought out. It was a punishment, not a reward. An aid, not a need. 

If Din couldn’t focus _without_ pain, it was because he was weak. A warrior didn’t seek out ways to impair their ability to fight. He could _use_ pain, yes, that was allowed, but he wasn’t allowed to _want_ it.

The sound of the whip cracking across bare skin echoed in his ears. 

Din bit his lip just to flood his mouth with salt. The sting was sharp and immediate, bright enough that it chased away most of the lingering ache in his arm and his head. He was tempted to do it again, to worry the tiny wound until it bloomed, but that wasn’t allowed either. 

Din made it down the hall and around the corner, half-blind with confusion and mortification and _desire._ He skirted the throne room entirely. He didn’t want to be around anyone. He didn’t want anyone to see. 

Memory and instinct carried Din down another hall, this one lined with little sleeping chambers. Guest rooms, most of them given over to dust. 

_Rooms that have locks on the doors,_ Din told himself. He found the last room at the end of the hall and pushed himself through it, his hands twitching as he engaged the lock. His pulse thundered in his ears. 

As soon as the door engaged, he tore his helmet off, his gauntlets, fumbled with the seals on his cuirass and his pauldrons. The beskar sang as it clattered to the ground. When he’d stripped down to his _kute_ Din let himself collapse back onto the bed, scattering dust.

He stared at the door. The red light blinked at him, calm and soothing. He was safe. 

_What,_ he thought, wondering what he’d just seen, and why it had made his heart race, _the kark was that?_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some notes: 
> 
> -My interpretation of Tusken culture comes from a) the EU, now sadly relegated to the Legends label (A'Sharad Hett was a boss, okay) and b) intricate headcanons. Sorry that the line is blurry and ever-shifting.  
> -Tusken culture (as set up by the EU) and Mandalorian culture have a lot of similarities! I feel like Din, raised Mandalorian in a diasporic culture, has a very nomadic mindset, which is why he gets along with Tuskens so well. Nomadic cultures and settled cultures often just Do Not Get Along, because not only are the ways nomadic cultures and settled cultures interact with their natural resources different, their value systems are also often so different as to be alien to each other  
> -Din again continues to think and believe things that are not necessarily true, but feel true to him with the information he has available  
> -You will pry polyglot!Din from my cold, dead hands  
> -Tatooine has some super cool wildlife! I would die for an [anooba](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/starwars/images/5/55/Anooba.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20110312151840), which I have also decided, through a process that is both arbitrary and arcane, would be Din's dæmon, if this was a dæmon AU (be grateful that it is not, because it would be unintelligible)  
> -How to you introduce a loner with religious trauma and a warped relationship with pain to the idea of healthy BDSM? You just throw it at him and hope for the best, I guess
> 
>   
> Your Song of the Week is "Victory," The Avett Brothers.  
> Thanks for reading!


	3. sha'kajir

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for all your kudos and comments!! I apologize for the delay. _A Court of Silver Flames_ came out last week and I did nothing but read it for five days, then I binged all of Bridgerton. My headspace is, as you might say, extravagantly deranged. 
> 
> Chapter-specific warnings are in the end note!

Din stayed in the dusty, forgotten room for hours. 

No one came to bash the door down, though. No one even came down the hall -- Din kept his auditory sensors tuned up to their highest setting, straining to hear a threat before it could jump down his throat, but no one came. 

After a tense hour or two, Din decided that Fett wasn’t coming, wasn’t sending his guards to throw Din out for interfering with Fett’s business, and DIn forced himself to relax. He’d been on the hunt for a few days and sleeping poorly for weeks before that. His body was exhausted. He hadn’t had a full night’s sleep since before Tython, unless Din counted being unconscious with a head injury in a tank full of bacta. 

_Fett is -- Fett is going to do what he’s going to in the morning,_ Din thought to himself. He eyed the locked door. A lock probably meant nothing to the king of the palace, but it made Din feel a little more protected, so he left it locked. 

His wrist hurt. The food he’d forced down before stumbling across Fett sat heavy in his belly. The adrenaline that had crashed through him had burned out, now, and left Din shaky and nervous in its wake. 

_Injury first,_ Din told himself. Leaving a bruise or two for a few days was one thing, but he knew better than to leave a more serious injury unchecked. The quickest way to get an infection was to leave a wound untended underneath hot beskar. 

Din sighed and groped around in his utility belt. He’d gotten into the habit of carrying around a few bacta patches when he’d first picked up the kid. Despite the fact that Grogu had been about a foot tall and barely able to walk, he’d been able to get into a tremendous amount of trouble. Din had always been patching him up, treating scraped knees or a banged head. The patches in his belt were old and faded -- Din had swiped them from a mark’s nest back on Cato Neimoidia months ago -- but they still worked, as far as Din knew. 

He fished a patch out and opened it, wincing at the astringent smell. Din eased his glove and gauntlet off his wrist, folding back the edge of his kute, and assessed the damage. 

The injury wasn’t as bad as Din had feared. His wrist was swollen and red, a bruise forming, but it wasn’t the deep, immediate color of a broken bone. Din flexed all of his fingers again to test their range of motion. Pain flared, but it was manageable. 

_Nothing to be done for it, I guess,_ Din thought wryly, slapping a patch over the worst of the swelling and pulling his kute back down. Despite its dubious age the bacta patch started to work almost immediately, a cool sensation breaking out along the back of Din’s hand. He flexed his fingers a few more times and sighed. 

He ended up lifting his helmet up enough to stick another patch underneath it at the back of his neck, to stave off the worst of a headache and the tension coiled there.

The familiar post-job rituals of tending to his injuries settled Din. He’d done this a thousand times over the years.

 _I want a sonic,_ he thought, looking around. The little room he’d chosen had its own ‘fresher, but not a sonic unit. Din took off his helmet long enough to splash water on his face and scrub sand off his neck, but it wasn’t the same. 

Din hesitated. He wanted to get clean -- _needed_ to get clean, to check himself over for any injuries he’d missed, to tend to his armor. The rituals after a hunt had been the same for as long as Din had been hunting. 

But he didn’t want to leave the safety, even imagined, of his room. 

There was a bed, old and dusty, so Din resigned himself to spending the rest of the night catching field naps, jerking awake at the slightest sound. 

It turned out that he didn’t even have to worry about that. No matter how he tossed and turned, Din couldn’t force himself to fall asleep. The bacta helped soothe his aches and pains, but his mind kept turning over and over in circles, like a massif chasing the stump of its tail. 

He couldn’t stop thinking about what he’d seen. About Fett’s face, the intensity of his dark eyes. The other man, the sounds he had made. 

Din’s thoughts grew so circular that, after another hour or two of going around and around in his own head, Din got so restless he had to jump up to his feet. Before he could lose his nerve, he disengaged the lock, slid the door open and crossed into the hall again. 

He was not a coward. If Fett had a problem with what Din had seen, Din could figure out how to deal with it. 

_Could take a paycut on Zhalto, maybe._ Beskar was valuable enough. If Din gave up a portion of his fee, it might be enough to convince Fett that Din hadn’t meant to go snooping. 

The palace was well and truly quiet now, in a way it hadn’t been under Jabba. Under Jabba the palace had seethed with noise and life even through the night, when the rest of the planet was sleeping. 

_Everyone really did leave, when Jabba died._ Fortuna must have been a karking idiot. Half of Jabba’s empire had been in protection money and hyperlane tolls -- maintaining that sort of income shouldn’t have been hard. But the palace was so desolate that Fortuna must have run the whole enterprise into the ground. 

Din poked around a little, though he was careful not to open any other doors. He had no intention of surprising Fett twice in one night. 

Din had made it down into one of the lower levels, sticking his head into storage rooms and service bays and anything else that had an open door, when he found the training room. 

The room was low-ceilinged but wide, divided into several raised rings. A rack of dusty melee weapons -- clubs and spears and even a _gaderffii_ or two -- leaned against one wall, and the opposite had rough, tiered seating. It wasn’t a formal match pit, not like some of the set-ups Din had seen on places like Canto Bight and Nar Shaddaa, where bidding on blood matches was common, but from a few of the discolorations on the floor, this room had seen its fair share of bloodshed. 

Din climbed up into one of the rings and looked around. 

_A Tusken made this._ Round rings were common among the tribes -- the chieftain would draw a circle in the sands, and his warriors would fight until all but one of the warriors was disarmed, or all but one of the warriors had been forced out of the circle. 

“I thought I might find you down here,” said Fett, his voice echoing in its vocoder. Din spun around, reaching for his blaster. 

Fett held up his hands. “Relax,” he said. “You’re safe here.” 

Din eyed him. “Fett,” he began, searching Fett for weapons. He was armed, a blaster at his hip, _gaderffii_ across his back, knives in his boots, but that was standard. None of his weapons were bared, which Din took as a tentatively positive sign. Maybe Fett just wanted to warn Din to be silent. 

Fett watched him for a moment, then shook his head. “You’re back early,” he observed. “Wasn’t expecting you for another cycle, maybe two. Fennec said you brought Zhalto in alright.” 

Din shrugged. “He didn’t fight too hard,” he said, still wary. 

Fett made a non-commital noise and climbed up into the ring with Din, looking around. His eyes fell on Din’s hip, where his blaster rested, and then Fett’s eyes found the hilt of the darksaber where it was half-hidden among the folds of Din’s cloak. 

“Still carrying that thing, huh?” 

“Yeah,” Din said. Din tried not to tense. He hated being reminded that he carried it. He wasn’t sure why Fett was skirting around the issue, but he didn’t want to push and force a confrontation if Fett wasn’t interested in pursuing one. Every warlord and crime boss operated differently.

“You ever train in _par’kad?_ ” Fett asked. 

“No,” Din said, reaching back through his memory for the words his first teachers had used to describe the various forms taught in the Fighting Corps. “By the time I was old enough to touch a weapon, there wasn’t enough beskar to go around for swords. We were all taught knives. I learned _par’bevii_ later.” 

Fett nodded, cutting his gaze towards Din’s spear. “Not much different from _gader’usul_ , yeah?”

Din thought for a moment. “There’s less bludgeoning involved, usually,” he said, a touch dry. Fett snorted. “But not much different, no.” Din had learned a little _usul’gad_ during his time with the White Bantha, but he hadn’t taken a _gaderffii_ with him when he’d left Tatooine to rejoin the covert so he hadn’t kept up with the style. Wielding a spear wasn’t too much different, though; Din’s beskar spear was much lighter than any _gaderffii,_ free of any heavy club or cudgel at one end, but much of the motion was the same. 

Fett hummed. “You up for a good old-fashioned _aza’gad?_ ” 

“Only if you don’t mind getting hit with a spear,” Din said. He’d rather fight than talk -- maybe he could throw the spar and tell Fett that Din wasn’t going to use anything he’d learned against him. 

That made Fett laugh. “No, I don’t mind,” he said. “There’s a good stock of bacta down below. ‘S long as we don’t break any bones Ushib won’t scold much.” 

“She’s your cook and your medic?” Din asked, resolving to meet this Ushib sooner rather than later. She sounded like the sort of person Din ought to get to know, if he was going to stick around. The cook was the heart of any covert.

The thought of sticking around longer made Din’s stomach twist. He told himself it was just another bout of nausea and pushed it aside. He wanted to stay, if only to continue avoiding Kryze and her expectations and earn more of Fett’s beskar, but he also wanted to grab his jetpack and bolt into the sky. 

_A fight will help settle my nerves,_ Din told himself. 

“Full besk?” Fett asked. 

Din nodded. He didn’t want to get whacked with a _gaderffii_ out of armor. 

“Rules?”

“This is your ring,” said Din. “Your rules.” 

Fett made a little pleased sound at that, like Din’s deference made him happy. Din didn’t know how to feel about that, so instead he unhooked his spear from his back and tugged the heavy folds of his cloak off over his head to free his movement. 

“Full contact, blunt ends only,” Fett said, pulling his _gaderffii_ over his shoulder to match Din’s ready stance. “No punctures, no cuts, no broken bones if we can help it. Your wrist gonna hold up?”

“Yes.” Din scowled under his helmet, irritated that Fett had noticed. He flexed his fingers and only felt a little pain. The bacta patch, expired or not, had done its job. Spearfighting was mostly two-handed, anyway, so Din’s good hand could support his bad. 

Fett shrugged. “If you’re sure,” he said. “Traditional _aza’gad_ rules -- first one disarmed loses.” 

Din nodded. 

Fett paused, the direction of his helmet falling back on the darksaber. “You want to use that instead?”

“No.” The blade would cut through Fett’s _gaderffii_ and Din didn’t know how to use it anyway, aside from the general idea. Din unclipped it, the shape of the hilt awkward and unfamiliar in his hand, and offered it to Fett. “You want to try it? It won’t cut through my spear or my armor. Gideon tried.” 

Fett looked at the darksaber, very quiet. His silence made Din’s neck prickle. Fett said, “You mind?” 

Din shook his head. Fett took the thing carefully, stepping forward and then back to give himself room to ignite the blade. The darksaber sprang to life in his hands. Fett took a few experimental slashes. He’d clearly done some bladework before, falling into a pattern of movement Din half-remembered from his earliest days in the Fighting Corps. The darksaber hissed as it cut through the air. 

“Strange,” Fett grunted. “Never used a _jetii’kad_ before. Feels different than a beskar blade.” He deactivated the blade and offered it back to Din, who thought for a moment about telling him to just keep it before taking it back and dropping it into the folds of his discarded cloak. 

“It _can_ cut through just about anything,” Din said, rolling his shoulders to loosen them up. He’d tried the darksaber out a bit back on the light cruiser, once it had become apparent that he was stuck with it for now. The darksaber had slashed through just about everything Din had thought to pit it against, and what it couldn’t cut through right away it could eventually melt. “I met a Jedi on Calodan. Her lightsabers were the same, but also… made differently.” 

Fett cocked his head. “You met a Jedi? In this era?” 

Din nodded. “Or someone who used to be a Jedi. She said she wasn’t one anymore.” Ahsoka Tano’s lightsabers had been less like blades and more light extensions of her hands. The darksaber was built like a traditional _kad,_ from what Din had seen of the ancient swords; a narrow hilt, an offset guard, a thin, tapering blade. Tano’s lightsabers had been cylindrical, made to fit easily in the hand, and they hadn’t had any guard to speak of. The lit blades had been as white as sunlight. 

“You should find her again, if she’s one of the friendly ones,” said Fett. “She might be able to teach you how to use that thing.”

 _There’s unfriendly Jedi?_ Din supposed that his _alor_ had said that Jedi were Mandalore’s ancient enemies, but the two Din had met had seemed reasonable enough. They, or at least Tano, had been people that Din could strike a contract with, and Cara had assured him that the Jedi who had taken the kid for training, this Luke Skywalker, was a hero of the Rebellion. 

“I don’t want to know how to use it,” Din said, flatly. He slid into the first stance of the _par’bevii,_ the clash of spears. Point down, both hands on the shaft, shoulders loose, chest open. Din breathed, and the familiarity of it settled him. 

Fett mirrored Din, readying himself, spinning his _gaderffii_ in his hand. Unlike _par’bevii,_ Tusken fighting styles had no resting starts or stillness. The desert, after all, wasn’t ever still; there was always something moving, a krayt, the wind, the sand. 

_Doesn’t matter,_ Din thought, refusing to give in to Fett’s restless energy. _I can be patient._

“C’mon,” Fett goaded, circling Din like a canyon kraft ready to go for the throat. “Hit me, Mandalorian.” Fett was leaving his left side open, a clear invitation, but Din wasn’t about to take the bait. He settled deeper into his own stance and waited. 

Fett huffed. Din couldn’t tell if it was amusement or annoyance, but he didn’t have time to try and parse it out. Fett got tired of waiting for Din to strike so he struck first, lashing out with the club end of his _gaderffii_. The movement was fast but dodgeable, and the opening it left Din was a trap. 

Din avoided the blow easily and didn’t take Fett’s bait this time, either. Fett was shorter than Din but as strong as a bladeback, and Din had seen him fight. If Din got caught in the circle of Fett’s arms he wouldn’t get out again.

Instead of lunging for the exposed line of Fett’s thigh, Din swept high with the beskar spear. Fett’s _gaderffii_ caught it, wood ringing against metal, and pushed Din back. Din turned Fett’s energy into his own, going sideways, and he swept the blunt end of the spear down and jammed it underneath the bottom edge of Fett’s cuirass. 

Fett’s breath went out of him in a crackly _whoosh._

“ _Ouch,_ ” Fett growled. His hand flashed, fast as a stinging kirik-fly, and caught the blunt end of Din’s spear before Din could pull it out of his reach. Din tugged experimentally. The spear didn’t budge. Fett was _strong._

“You fight like a Corellian scrumrat,” Fett said, once he’d gotten his breath under control. Fett shifted his grip on his _gaderffii._ Din eyed it and loosened his own grip, relaxing just enough that Fett, mirroring Din consciously or unconsciously, did the same. “Do all your _vode_ fight so dirty?” 

“I was smaller than most of the other kids in the Corps,” Din said, still eyeing that _gaderffii._ He had a decent idea of what Fett would try to do with it; the end was hooked, and if Fett got it underneath one of Din’s feet he could pull Din over. He wasn’t letting go of the spear, reeling Din in like a gored snapfish. Fett was giving Din two choices; he could either hang onto the spear and get within range of the _gaderffii,_ which would no doubt make a tremendous sound when it met the side of Din’s head, or he could let go of his spear and lose the _aza’gad_ before it had even really started. 

_Kark that._ Din put all his weight on the balls of his feet. “I had to figure out how to win in spars somehow,” he continued. 

Fett snorted. His grip on the beskar spear tightened. Leather creaked. “You win a lot of spars?” 

“Not at first,” Din admitted, because it was true. His first few years in the Corps had been a disaster. He’d been small and half a decade behind the other kids in forms and strength training. Din hadn’t won a spar for over two standard years. Fett tilted his head, considering something, and Din moved. 

Instead of trying to yank his spear out of Fett’s grip and stumble backwards, which would give Fett an opening with that wicked hook, Din went _forward_ ; he punched his spear through Fett’s grip. His aim was off so he missed that soft, vulnerable spot just underneath Fett’s cuirass -- probably for the best, since Din didn’t _really_ want to hurt him -- and glanced off Fett’s armor instead. 

It didn’t matter. A hit was a hit and Fett was shoved back by the force of the blow, beskar ringing. Din’s spear sang in his hands, the resonance strong enough to feel even through his gloves. He grinned underneath his helmet. Fett swiped at him with his _gaderffii_ but Din was already out of range. 

“Once I figured out that I could cheat, I won a lot,” Din said. 

Fett _laughed._ The sound was made rusty by his vocoder, but underneath that it was deep and rich. A curl of pride licked Din’s ribs. “You must’ve been a terror,” Fett said, and when he said it it sounded like a compliment. 

Before Din could think of a way to respond to that, Fett moved. He dropped a shoulder and darted forward, faster than someone his size had a right to be, and when Din moved to duck the _gaderffii,_ Fett punched Din in the side of the head. 

Din’s helmet spluttered, internal controls whining. His right ear rang. Din rolled with the blow, used to it -- everyone always went for the helmet -- and used the sharp end of his spear to clear some space between them. 

It worked. Fett skipped back, wary of the spear’s edge, and Din shook his head like an anooba shaking off sand. 

“Ouch,” Din repeated dryly. 

Fett chuckled. “Should’ve been faster.” 

Din snorted and flicked his spear out again, testing how fast Fett could move to avoid it. Fett sidestepped it neatly and responded with some testing of his own, swiping and dodging with a dangerous grace.

Their bodies fell into a familiar rhythm. The particulars of each fighting style varied from covert to covert but the core of Mandalorian training was the same everywhere, and Fett and Din had both been well-trained. Din used his feet more and Fett used his own body like a battering ram, but they were both well-matched, solid in the foundations of their forms and experienced besides. 

If Fett’s father had been a foundling, Fett must have come up training. Most Mandalorian children started basic footwork and strikes at four or five standard. Fett certainly moved like he’d been training that long. He cut a particularly vicious strike towards Din’s head that had Din breaking form to scramble back, though Din recovered quickly and retaliated by scoring another hit under the edge of Fett’s cuirass. 

“You’re worse than a bloody massif,” Fett grunted, and he decided to turn the fight in his favor by dropping all pretense and charging forward, bringing his _gaderffii_ down in a brutal arc.

Din brought his leg up to stop the blow without thinking. The _gaderffii_ crashed into the plate covering his thigh, diffusing most of the force through his kute, but pain still shuddered up his hip and lodged itself in the base of his spine.

Din swore viciously and planted his spear into the floor, using it as leverage to kick Fett as hard as he could manage. He got Fett in the knee. Fett swore too and crumpled, bracing himself against his _gaderffii_. 

They stared at each other for a minute, panting, and then Fett laughed. 

“Why don’t we call it a draw, this time?” he said. Din held onto his spear warily. “Before we start fighting any dirtier. Deal?” 

It went against Din’s nature to stop a spar without a clear winner emerging, but Fett was right -- the longer they fought, the more likely it was that one of them would seriously hurt the other, which would break the rules of the _aza’gad_ anyway. 

“Deal,” Din agreed, reluctantly. His leg _did_ hurt, and he knew without having to peel his kute off and check that he’d have a bruise the size and shape of his thigh plate across his leg for days. 

Din tucked his spear back into its hook against his back, leaving his cloak where it lay at the edge of the ring. He scooped up the darksaber and clipped it back to his hip, then flexed his leg. A hot, dull pain throbbed through him from his hip to his knee, lodged into the muscles of his thigh. He blew out a breath. 

“You hit hard,” Din said, testing his weight. The pain intensified, the throb becoming a red buzz that cut through even the faint, ever-present ringing in Din’s ears, but the leg held. 

“So do you,” Fett said, rising up off his injured knee. He prodded a spot beneath his cuirass. “Thank you. Fennec won’t spar with me. It’s been a while since I’ve had someone put me through my paces.” 

“It’s been a while for me too,” Din admitted. He and Cara had wrestled around a bit, but that wasn’t the same as a formal spar. Din hadn’t been able to spar with another Mandalorian in over a standard year, since before he’d found the kid. 

Fett stood up again, shaking himself off. His armor rattled. “You need med bay?”

Din shook his head. He was sore and would likely be even more sore in the morning, but he still had a few bacta patches back in his room and he’d had spars with Paz that had ended worse. 

Fett looked Din up and down, expression unreadable behind his helmet. “You sure?” 

“I’m fine,” Din said, irritation flickering in his gut. He didn’t understand what Fett and Fennec’s fixation on his health was. Concern for an ally was one thing, but Din was a warrior. If he said that he was fine, he was fine. 

Fett finally let the matter drop. “C’mon, then,” he said. “Best way to end a spar’s with _tihaar_ and some Tusken curry.” 

Din’s stomach rumbled at the mention of food. He hadn’t been hungry until Fett had brought it up. But as good as a plate of curry sounded, Din hesitated.

Fett ignored Din’s spike of unease and turned to leave. Din trailed behind him, nerves rising. 

Fett had been honorable in the spar. He’d fought hard, but hadn’t turned a spar into a death-match. He probably wasn’t going to drop Din down into a rancor pit or anything like that, even if Din had intruded on Fett’s private business. 

Din left his cloak behind just in case, so he had easy access to his spear and the darksaber if he needed either. 

Fett led him through the palace’s twisting, tunnel-like halls into an airy, earthen space. The Hutt’s palace had been built in the Hutt style, but it was still a Tatooinian building -- its heart was its kitchen. The rule held for settler homes and slave quarters and Tusken camps alike. Din softened a little to see that the rule held true here too. 

The palace kitchens were enormous, built to feed hundreds at a time. Most of the stoves and roasting pits were cold and dark; only one Tusken-style oven, built of baked mud, and one enormous, battered curry pot, glowed with heat. 

“Ushib’s off for the night,” Fett explained. “She goes back to her tribe every now and then, to make sure the men haven’t killed each other. She always leaves something for us, though.” 

“Why does she work for you?” Din asked curiously. He’d never heard of a Tusken leaving their tribe to work for a _ghuy’ra._ Most Tuskens who left their tribes, either voluntarily or by force, wandered in the desert until they died. 

Fett was silent for a moment, leaning over the big curry pot to see what was inside. “Her tribe took me in,” he finally said. “Years ago. I was -- injured, on a job. Should’ve died. The Tuskens took me in and let me get strong again. Ushib… she’s an old woman. Bloodmate’s dead, children dead. Her tribe was nearly wiped out in the Anchorhead retaliations. She took a liking to me, and when word started to spread that I’d come back here and intended to take over old Jabba’s operation, she came to make sure I wouldn’t starve.” 

Din winced. He’d been long gone by the time the people of Anchorhead and the surrounding settlements had taken to the sands to pay the Tuskens back for their attack on the town, but he knew that the Tuskens hadn’t come out very well. Some tribes had been wiped off the face of the planet. 

“Don’t tell her I told you that,” Fett warned. “Ushib’s private.” 

“Most Tuskens are private,” Din pointed out. Fett chuckled. 

“Fair point,” he said. “C’mon, sit, eat. At least drink with me, yeah?” Fett ducked behind a cabinet and came back out with a tall jar of clear liquid and two chipped earthenware cups. Fett used an arm to clear off some space on a counter, scattering _japoor_ meal, and poured a few fingers of the clear liquid into each cup. There were two stools jammed underneath the counter, one on either side. 

Din, feeling a little trapped, went over to him and took one of the cups and a stool, though he didn’t drink. He couldn’t smell the alcohol underneath his mask. He stared into the cup, unsure what to do with his body or his hands. Fett released the seal on his own helmet and took it off, setting down on the counter. He lifted his cup in Din’s direction, a strange, knowing sort of look on his face, and draining his cup in a single swallow. 

Din eyed him. Despite the fact that the kitchen was enormous, Fett stood close enough that Din felt his presence like a barrier. The way that they stood now, Fett was between Din and the door, unless there was another door farther back in the kitchen that Din couldn’t see. 

Din’s vision narrowed. He didn’t drink. 

Fett watched him for a minute, and then sighed. “I thought maybe food and drink would put you at ease,” he said. “But we can do this up in my rooms, if that’ll help.”

“Do what,” said Din, tone flat in alarm.

“Talk about what you walked in on,” Fett said. He poured himself another small measure of _tihaar._

Din tensed. His kute creaked with the movement.

“I’m not Jabba, you know,” Fett said, still watching. “I’m not gonna have you dropped down into the rancor pit just because you walked in on me enjoying some of my… odder pastimes.” 

“Is that what it was?” Din asked, confused now. “I didn’t mean -- how you punish your people isn’t any of my business. I just heard -- through the door, I heard what sounded like someone in pain.”

Fett blinked. “Punishment?” he said. 

Din shrugged, uncomfortable.

“Theran and I have an arrangement,” Fett said, slowly. Theran must have been the name of the man he’d been hitting. Din’s shoulders pulled even tighter. “He knew me before, when all of this was Jabba’s. We… have compatible interests.” 

That made Din frown. “Compatible… interests?” He didn’t understand. 

“ _Ni gaa’tayl_ ,” Fett muttered. His expression was pained. “Yeah, compatible interests. He likes -- to give someone else control over his body,” Fett said. “He likes pain. He likes… someone to look after him, to decide what he feels and when he feels it.”

Din’s body, oddly enough, started to warm. “And you…” he said slowly, trying to understand. 

“Like to take control, yeah,” said Fett. He cocked his head to the side. “Like to cause pain too.” 

Din’s stomach twisted, and he didn’t understand why. “Oh,” he said, still confused. His eyes widened underneath his helmet. He hadn’t walked in on Fett punishing a subordinate -- he’d walked in on something much more intimate. An exchange -- Theran gave Fett control, or Fett took control from Theran, and Theran _liked_ it. That was why his cries of pain had been headier, heavier. He had wanted the pain, and Fett had given it to him. 

Din put the cup of _tihaar_ down so he didn’t crack it in his grip. 

Fett seemed to understand that Din had made the intuitive leap, because he relaxed a fraction and said, “‘S not as bad as you’re worried about, Djarin. Theran didn’t notice, and he doesn’t mind an audience anyway. It’s just -- it’s a matter of discretion, yeah?” 

“I won’t tell anyone,” Din assured Fett, mortified. “I’m not -- I don’t share other people’s secrets.” 

“No, you wouldn’t,” Fett said, and Din didn’t know how to interpret his tone either. “You’ve got your honor. But that’s not all I wanted to talk to you about.” 

Din froze again.

“Sometimes,” Fett started, “pain is good. For some it’s a focus, or a reminder, or a reason.”

“Is that why you were… was it to help Theran?” Din tried to imagine how taking a whipping could help Theran and then had to stop before his thoughts got too far out of his own control. His mouth was dry, his stomach tight. Heat simmered in Din’s blood. 

Fett shrugged. “That’s between me and Theran,” he said. 

Din knew better than to push. Fett’s tone was still friendly enough, but there was a thread of steel underneath his words, harder than beskar. He wouldn’t be pushed any further. 

_Not that I would._ Din didn’t know Theran. He didn’t even know Fett, not really. What they did in Fett’s own palace was none of Din’s business. So he just nodded once, sharply, to show Fett that he understood and wouldn’t go chasing Theran down in the halls or spilling Fett’s secrets to the nearest paying customer, and picked up his cup again for want of something to do with his hands. 

Fett relaxed. He tilted his head to the side, considering something. His scrutiny made Din’s palms sweat, made him feel like Fett could see right through Din’s armor to his heart. Din resisted the urge to puff up like a spit adder. Fett studied him for another handful of moments and then nodded to himself, like he’d come to some sort of decision. 

“Your _buy’ce_ ,” Fett said, drumming his fingers over the matte green metal of his own helmet still resting at his elbow. “Can you take it off?”

Din did puff up then, his back stiffening in instinctive alarm. He forced himself to lay his hands flat against the table, putting the cup down again so he didn’t spill it and betray his own nerves. 

_My ally,_ he told himself firmly. _My ally, not my enemy._ He forced himself to take a shallow breath and said, “Why?

“Because I want to ask you something,” Fett said, patiently. His dark eyes searched Din’s visor. “And I’d prefer to see your face while I did it. If that’s alright?” 

Din’s hands were frozen. His gaze flickered around the room, instinctively seeking an exit. _Door,_ he thought, but Fett’s body was in the way. _Chute_ , but the chute was too narrow and Din didn’t know where it led. His heart kicked in his chest. 

Fett was silent for a moment, watching Din force himself to stay very, very still, and then Fett sighed and, to Din’s utter mortification, he moved, shifting to stand well away from the door, opening a safe path back into the hallway.

Din stared at him. 

Fett waited. Din was reminded of his own words to Zhalto out in the desert. _I won’t ask a third time._

He swallowed. 

_It’s fine,_ he told himself, pitting his will against whatever animal instinct kept his hands weighted down on the counter like stones. _It’s fine. I can do it. I_ should _do it -- I should take it off and never put it back on again._

Din brought his hands up and curled his fingers around the edges of his helmet. Fett had seen his face before. Fett was a Mandalorian who showed his own face to everyone and somehow found the strength to put his beskar back on every time. He was Din’s ally. Hands jerky, Din flicked the seal and pulled his helmet off.

The air in this room was dry and cool. Din clutched his helmet and made himself look Fett in the eyes. He managed to hold Fett’s gaze for a handful of heartbeats before he couldn’t anymore and had to drop his eyes to Fett’s chin, which felt safer to look at. Quieter, somehow, and without any expectations. 

“ _Jate,”_ said Fett, his voice so warm that Din couldn’t help but look up and meet his eyes again before tearing his gaze away, this time settling on the scars around one of Fett’s ears. 

_Jate,_ Din thought, committing the word to memory. He didn’t have to speak Mandalorian to know that it was praise, and it curled through him like a cool wind, soothing some of his nerves. 

“You don’t show your face often, huh?” Fett asked. 

Din shrugged a little. There was no point in denying it. Din knew how he looked. Tired, unkempt, pale from all his time shielded from the sun. Fett had some color to him underneath the white patchwork of scars, brown skin coaxed out by time out of his armor, but Din never took his helmet off unless he was completely alone and even then only to eat or hop in the sonic or shave or sleep. He wasn’t exactly stepping out of his beskar to lounge around in the sun. 

He could still count on one hand the number of times he’d taken his helmet off around others. Once on Morak, once for Grogu, twice in front of Kyrze and her _tal’vode._ And now once for Fett. 

Din’s fingers tightened on his helmet. He made himself meet Fett’s eyes again. Noise roared in his ears. “Well?” Din said. Fett blinked, as if the rough sound of Din’s voice outside of his vocorder was surprising to him. 

“Well,” Fett said, shaking his own head a little. He looked Din up and down, expression unreadable, then nodded to himself and said, “What’s your relationship with pain?” 

Din blinked, startled. “Uh,” he said, “what?” 

Fett cocked his head. “What’s your relationship with pain?” he repeated. “Good, bad, want it, don’t want it? Does it distract you, or does it help you focus?”

“Nobody _wants_ ,” Din started, but then he stopped himself. That wasn’t true. There were obviously some beings out there that _did_ want pain -- Fett’s friend Theran had, according to Fett, sought him out just so Fett would hurt him. And Fett liked giving pain, and knew that he liked giving pain. To know that about himself, Fett would’ve had to learn it somewhere.

Din heard the sound of that whip cracking again, saw the bright red marks across Theran’s back, and dug his fingers into his helmet so hard he felt the edges of it through his gloves. 

If Din had marks like that across his own back, he could roll his shoulders and snap to attention wherever he was, no matter what he was doing. The weight of his armor would remind him every time he took a step. Din’s gaze drifted to Fett’s arms, the solid strength in them. Din’s mouth was dry, so he licked his lips.

Din had always savored his bruises. Broken bones and deep cuts were something he always tried to heal, either with bacta or with whatever tools he had on hand, but he kept his bruises as long as he could. He always had. As a foundling they had been reminders, proof of his failure to stand on equal footing against the others. When he’d grown older they had been proof that Din had _made_ it. That he’d measured up, had earned his place, that he kept earning every time he got up after taking a hit. 

Din’s gaze settled on the bridge of Fett’s nose, and Din thought about the deep bruise forming on his thigh. He thought about how much he liked it. 

Fett’s eyes saw too much. Din looked away again. 

“Have you ever thought about it?” Fett asked quietly. He’d made the connection without Din needing to say anything further -- was Din really so obvious? He felt flayed open already, like all of his nerves were peeled back and on display. “About letting someone hurt you?” 

Din swallowed. “Letting someone -- no,” he said. He couldn’t even say it, not all the way. Sure, he’d purposely stumbled during a spar a time or two, walked into a punch or a kick that left him with deep, satisfying bruises, and sometimes he’d pushed himself hard enough during training that he carried the strain burning deep in his muscles for days, but he didn’t go out of his way to get hurt and the idea of _asking_ someone to bruise him or mark him or even work him so hard Din was left with lingering soreness was nauseating.

“Why?”

Din shook his head. He couldn’t answer. Fett wasn’t Din’s tribe -- he didn’t understand what showing weakness, any weakness, meant for a hunter in the covert. If Din had gone around asking the other warriors to hit him or had purposely thrown fights in order to catch a beating, he would’ve lost his place as _beroya._

The closest he’d ever gotten had been asking Paz to spar whenever Din had been in from a job. Paz fought hard and even though he hadn’t been able to win a fight against Din since they were kids, sparring with him had always left Din sore and limping for days afterwards, a fierce glow of pride kindling every time he stretched or a bit of his armor jostled a bruise.

“Why not?” Fett prompted. 

“I shouldn’t need it,” Din said, harshly. “The only things a warrior needs are his armor and his courage.”

Fett shrugged. “Those are important,” he agreed. “But a warrior can’t march on just courage, you know.”

“Why are you asking?” Din kept his gaze firmly on Fett’s chin. 

“You’re Mandalorian,” Fett said, oblivious to the way the word made Din’s skin crawl. “A warrior. Warriors have… an interesting relationship with pain. The good ones, anyway. Not just anyone can push themselves through training. Some warriors… they get through it because they have to, but others get through it because they like it. Pain helps them focus, helps them center themselves.” 

Din tensed. 

“I think it might help you,” Fett continued. He looked pointedly at Din’s leg, like he could see the bruise forming there. “And I think that you want it, though it’s hard to tell when you’ve got your armor on.” 

Din clutched his helmet and thought about slamming it back over his head. He didn’t, because he wasn’t a panicked animal no matter how much this conversation made him feel like one, but he thought about it. 

Din swallowed. “Just because I want something doesn’t mean that I need it,” he said. He’d learned that early. 

Fett’s eyes softened. “No,” he agreed. “But it doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t have it, either.” 

Din snorted. This entire conversation felt like a trap, and Din was determined not to walk into it. “I’ve lived this long without it,” Din challenged. “I’m not -- I’m an effective warrior. I provide for the tribe, I haven’t lost a bounty in years, I brought in renown for the Guild -- “

“Yeah,” Fett said, holding up a hand that silenced Din more effectively than a blow, “ _not_ what I meant. “I’ve seen you fight, Mandalorian, I know you’re capable.” He gestured at his knee, grimacing ruefully. “I’m gonna have a few bruises of my own when the suns rise.” 

Din subsided, feeling mutinous and like he’d lost the thread of the conversation, but that wasn’t a rare feeling these days. He’d been out of his depth since he’d woken up on the light cruiser in a tank full of bacta. 

“All I meant,” Fett continued, “is that if you _want_ more, if you want to see what pain could do for you, well.” Fett gestured at himself. “You’re in a good place to try it out, is all.” 

“With you?” Din said, before his brain could catch up with his mouth. 

Fett’s expression went carefully neutral. “If you wanted. There’s others around with… similar proclivities. A few of the Palace guards, some beings in Mos Eisley. Fennec, even, though she doesn’t usually play with men. She likes you enough she’d be willing to help out.” 

Din made a face, then remembered that he wasn’t wearing a helmet and stopped, heat rising in his cheeks. 

Fett chuckled. “Fennec’s out, then?” 

Din carefully studied the edge of one of Fett’s cheekbones. He chewed his lip for a moment, thinking hard. His first, strongest instinct was to say _Kark, no_ and close the door firmly on Fett’s proposition. Din didn’t need that kind of entanglement. He still needed to earn more of that beskar -- if Fett decided that Din was too weak, he wouldn’t send Din out hunting anymore, and the beskar would be lost. 

_But he doesn’t think that Theran is weak,_ Din reasoned. Fett thought Theran strong enough to guard the palace, even though Theran liked to be struck. If Din asked for the same thing, maybe Fett wouldn’t consider it a weakness. 

“What would it… how would I know? If I wanted it?” Din asked. He determinedly ignored the dull blush coloring his neck. “If it would… help me.” 

Fett shrugged. “I can’t answer that for you,” he said. “You’d just take it slow, and stop it if something was happening that you didn’t like.”

“Stop it?” 

“Yeah. In an arrangement either party -- you or me, if you wanted to try it with me, or you and whoever else you picked -- can stop at any time.”

“Oh,” Din said, understanding a little better. It wasn’t punishment at all, then. If a soldier was being discplined for breaking orders, he couldn’t stop the punishment whenever he wanted. But if Din tried -- well, tried _something_ with Fett, and Din didn’t like it or, as he suspected would be the case, liked it _too_ much and got too close to revealing how weak he really was, Din could call it off. 

He relaxed a little bit at that. He couldn’t help it. The jaws of the conversational trap he’d somehow walked into loosened, and Din’s heartbeat slowed. 

Fett was still watching him.

“How would I stop it?” Din asked. 

“There’s a word, usually,” Fett explained. “ _Gev, rahm, luubid_ , something like that.” 

“ _Gev,_ ” Din repeated, tasting the word. He knew that one -- trainers had yelled it on the fields to get foundlings to stop whacking each other with sticks. 

Fett nodded. 

“It’s that easy?” 

“It’s that easy,” Fett agreed. 

The jaws of the trap tightened again -- nothing was ever that easy -- but Fett was sincere enough that Din couldn’t help but believe him, just a little. He was curious despite himself, anyway, and there was still heat in his belly, sharp with longing. 

He couldn’t stop thinking about the sounds Theran had made as Fett had struck him. About the redness across his shoulders. 

Din’s mouth dried out. The hairs on the back of his neck stood up.

“Here,” said Fett, reading the hungry curiosity in Din’s bare face, stepping closer. “Let me show you. Remember your word? _Gev_ to get me to stop, alright?”

“Alright,” Din agreed, wary now. He made to stand, but Fett shook his head. He approached slowly, every movement clear and telegraphed so that Din could push away or move back if he wanted, but this was a test, of sorts, and Din was determined to measure up. To prove -- 

_Well, I don’t know,_ Din admitted to himself. But Fett wanted Din to prove _something,_ and Din was determined to meet Fett’s regard. 

So he didn’t flinch or back away or bolt, like Fett clearly expected him to. Din held his ground and tilted his chin up, challenging. 

“Confident,” Fett murmured, his voice low and rich. “I like that.” 

Something indefinable shivered beneath Din’s ribs. Fett was close enough to touch, close enough that Din could feel the heat of him, smell the warrior on him, the sweat and the beskar and faint strains of Tusken incense, _cedru_ and spice. 

Still moving deliberately, Fett took a hand and placed it on Din’s thigh, fingers curling around the edges of the plate covering his thigh. Din froze. Fett smiled, his eyes bright, and _pushed._

Din snarled, pain erupting from a warm dull ache into white-hot agony, and tried to jerk away, but Fett was faster. His other hand came up to catch Din by the throat, fingers closing just under his jaw, and held fast. 

Din’s entire universe narrowed down to those fingers around his throat. Even the roar of pain in his leg fell off abruptly. Din dropped his helmet and scrabbled at Fett’s hand, seeking a weakness in his grip, but Fett _tsk_ ed. 

“None of that, now,” he said, firmly. Din stared at him. He could feel his own heartbeat thundering against Fett’s fingertips. “Relax,” Fett ordered. His tone has sharpened, brightened. “You can still breathe, yeah?” 

Din took a few shallow breaths to confirm -- he could still breathe. It was harder, and every time he inhaled he felt his throat work against Fett’s hand, felt that grip like durasteel on either side of his jaw. 

“I need to hear you say it,” Fett said. Everything about him was implacable. “Can you breathe?”

“Yes,” Din rasped. He stared up into Fett’s eyes, shocked. This wasn’t -- this wasn’t what Din had expected. Wasn’t what he’d thought. 

“ _Jate,”_ said Fett warmly. Din’s eyes widened at the praise. Fett noticed -- of course he noticed -- and his tone softened further, like a warrior approaching a frightened child. “Very good,” he repeated. “I want you to let go of my hand, alright?” 

Both of Din’s hands were still locked around Fett’s, fingers digging into the leather of Fett’s glove. Din blinked. He wasn’t sure if he could make himself let go. 

“Grip the edge of the counter if you have to,” Fett suggested. “But I need you to let go. I can make you, if you need me to.”

 _Make me?_ Din thought, dazed. His helmet had fallen, abandoned on the ground. He swallowed, Fett’s fingers digging into the soft skin underneath his jaw, and did as he was told. Din forced himself to let go of Fett’s hand. He did grab the counter as Fett had suggested, digging in so hard his fingers creaked, but he did as Fett asked. 

“Good,” Fett rumbled. Din’s whole body softened at the warmth in his tone. “Very good. Don’t let go.” Even though his tone was soft, Din’s body recognized his words as an order. Fett squeezed Din’s throat, very gently. “I need you to tell me you understand,” he said. 

“Yes,” Din said, the word sticking underneath Fett’s gloved palm like a shard of glass. “Yes, I understand.” 

This time Fett’s praise was nonverbal, a considering little _hmm_ sound that made Din understand that he was being tested again. 

“This is going to hurt,” Fett said, and his eyes were bright as he said it. Fett loosened his grip on Din’s throat just enough to let Din breathe easy, then he took the hand that was still on Din’s thigh, curled around the edges of his leg plate, and pushed. 

The pain bloomed and built. Din’s kute protected him from the worst of the armor’s edges but not even the thick, stiff fabric could diffuse all of that _tension_ ; Fett bore down with considerable strength, pushing the bruise deeper and deeper. 

Din made a thin sound, determined not to cry out. Fett’s grip was beskar. Din’s own gloves creaked as he clung to the edge of the counter like it was the only thing keeping him anchored in the world. 

_It isn’t, though,_ Din realized, in the small part of his brain that was still able to realize and rationalize things. The rest of his mind was fading, disappearing under the low, building roar of agony spreading up from his hip, licking his ribs, tangling into his spine. Din’s hands held him fast to the counter, but Fett was the one anchoring Din to the side of the planet. 

Fett bore down, inexorable. If he pressed any harder Din was sure the beskar plate would punch through the material of his kute, through his skin, through his entire leg. Din made a muffled noise of pain behind his teeth and tried to jerk away, but the hand around his throat held him so fast black spots danced in front of his eyes. 

“Easy,” Fett soothed. Din resisted. The counter moaned. The hand at Din’s throat was hot even through the leather, and Din abruptly wished that he could feel Fett’s bare hand against his throat, touching skin no other being had touched in thirty years. 

“You’re stubborn, you know that?” said Fett, conversationally. Din hoped that Fett didn’t expect Din to talk back, not anymore -- if Din opened his mouth he was going to start shouting, and he wouldn’t give Fett the satisfaction. “Easy, _Djar’ika,_ you don’t have to fight it so hard.” 

Din jerked at the endearment, furious, and bared all of his teeth. 

Fett laughed. “Easy,” he repeated. “Don’t fight me so hard. Lean into it. Let it happen. It’s not like you have any other choice, yeah? Unless you have something you want to say?” His grip loosened enough that Din could speak and end it, if he wanted to -- the word was an easy one to say. 

_Gev._ Enough. Din tasted it against his teeth. 

But he could taste something else, too, on the other side of Fett’s hand. Something sweet and dark, a relief. Din wanted it. He wanted it. 

So he swallowed the watchword and looked up at Fett, teeth still half-bared in pain. 

Fett smiled. “I think I can help,” he said. Still keeping a solid grip on Din’s throat, Fett let up on his leg. The release of pressure was almost worse; the bearing vanished and all of the muscles in Din’s thigh throbbed in protest, a bone-deep bolt of agony that had him biting back a whine, fingers digging into the counter. 

Fett released the seal on the plate, detaching it from the wires in Din’s kute. He set it aside with more care than Din had shown his helmet, which still lay askew on the floor, and put his hand back on Din’s thigh. 

Din’s mouth went dry with more than just fear and pain. 

“You’re doing very well,” Fett told him. Din tried not to sag in relief. He was doing well. He was meeting Fett’s test, and he wasn’t failing. Din swallowed. 

Using the heel of his hand, Fett started to press down on Din’s bruised leg again, but this time instead of uniform, terrible pressure, he used his heel to push down and then up, moving the pain around. Pushing it deeper. Fett worked the tension out with unerring patience and skill. It wasn’t _comfortable_ \-- Din hurt too badly for that -- but it felt _good,_ felt hard-won, like the ache in Din’s shoulders after a hard workout or a good spar. Din’s lips parted. 

“There you are,” said Fett. “That’s it, just lean into it.” 

His hand pushed the pain through Din like the wind carving a dune. Steady, inexorable and all-around, from the top of Din’s knee to the base of his hip, working even through the thick layer of his kute. The red haze in Din’s mind softened and spread. It seeped into his spine and the base of his skull. It drowned out the hammering of his heart and the ringing in his ears.

Fett said something else, a deep rumble, but Din didn’t hear it. His eyelids flickered. He was aware of a few points of contact -- his own fingers wrapped around the counter, Fett’s glove underneath his jaw, the unbelievable ache in his entire right leg -- but finer details slid through his awareness like sand. 

Eventually, the hand on his throat loosened. Without that point of contact anchoring him Din swayed dangerously, a bubble of confusion rising from the haze in his thoughts, but before Din could do more than examine the confusion or do anything embarrassing like slide off his stool, there was a hand in his hair and cool metal against his face, Fett’s deep voice rumbling against his cheek. 

“Well?” said Fett as the haze over Din began to recede. “You still with me, _Djar’ika?_ ”

“Mmph,” mumbled Din. Fett had tucked Din firmly against his own chest. His beskar was cool. 

“You mind if I touch you?” Fett asked, the hand in Din’s hair moving gently, skimming the top of Din’s head. Din barely felt it, still wrapped up in the deep heartbeat of pain echoing up and down his spine. 

“You’ve already touched me,” Din mumbled. He knew, dimly, that he ought to pull away and sit back, sit up, present himself like a warrior, but he was having a hard time convincing his body to cooperate. He was still clutching the edge of the counter with both hands. 

Fett’s laugh rumbled through Din’s chest. 

“Fair enough,” Fett said. He skimmed a hand over Din’s head again, fingers catching lightly on knots and tangles, then he used the other hand to coax Din’s fingers out of their locked position. Fett soothed Din’s cramped hands and worked a few tangles out of his hair. Din tolerated the touch. He felt bare, sanded down, like Fett had somehow, with just his hands, blunted some of the edges inside Din that Din had been cutting himself open on since the fight on the light cruiser. 

It was nice. 

Din tolerated Fett’s touch for another few minutes. Then he stirred, peeling his face off Fett’s chest. 

“Sorry,” he said thickly. His tongue was heavy, his throat raw. Fett hadn’t ever choked him, hadn’t squeezed hard enough to drive Din’s breath away, but Din could still feel the weight of Fett’s hand there. “I should -- I can go. We can -- talk later.” 

Fett snorted, amused. Din didn’t really have the best angle to see his face from their current position, but Fett didn’t move away. “I’m good,” he said. “There’s no rush, Djarin.” 

“But you -- ” Din started, but Fett didn’t let him finish. Fett used the hand still in Din’s hair to tug Din forward again, gently but firmly, soothing Din back down against his chest.

“Nah,” said Fett, propping himself up against the counter. “I’m good. I don’t have anywhere I need to be, so if you need more time, take it. We can talk when you’re ready. Whatever you want.”

Din wanted a sonic. He wanted to close a door somewhere and peel of his armor, wanted to examine the marks Fett had left on his body. He wanted to eat and drink _tihaar_ and sit and think about what he’d just done. About what he’d let Fett do.

Despite all of that, Din leaned back into Fett’s chest and closed his eyes. Fett’s hand kept moving through his hair, gentle as the breeze. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some notes: 
> 
> -This chapter features non-sexual choking (light), consensual injury, sparring as foreplay (even if they don't know it's exactly foreplay) and the beginnings of negotiation for a BDSM relationship.  
> -Din has some patterns of behavior that shade towards passive self-harm.  
> -Din also has some weird ideas about, like, everything, stemming from, you know. The cult stuff.  
> -The "ika" in Mando'a is diminutive, like Russian, and can be used to shorten nicknames between friends and family. Everybody and their mom uses "Din'ika," which is obviously very cute, but I'm #different. Traditionally the "ika" takes the place of the last syllable in a name; Ordo becomes Ord'ika, Djarin becomes Djar'ika, Grogu would be Gro'ika (ew), et cetera. 
> 
> Today's song of the week is "All My Girls Like To Fight," Hope Tala. You can thank Barack Obama's excellent taste in music for this one. 
> 
> I have next chapter mostly done as well, so expect that out next Friday. 
> 
> Remember that the dictionary updates and moves!


	4. arpat

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You all. Your support continues to blow me out of the water. I am overwhelmed. 
> 
> Thank you all!! If I don't reply to your comment, please don't take it as me not caring or being appreciative! I am so so grateful and also so, so paralyzingly shy, lol. 
> 
> You all are keeping me going!
> 
> Please see the end note for chapter-specific content warnings if you need to.

Din woke up an indeterminate amount of time later to find out that he’d drooled all over Fett’s beskar. Half his cheek was creased with sleep and there was an ache in his neck that spoke to at least a standard hour bent in an uncomfortable position. He was warm, too, and heavy. His thoughts were wrapped in a comfortable layer of fog.

All of these little pieces of information hit Din all at once and he jerked back, flushing with embarrassment, only to nearly overbalance himself on the stool he was still slumped in. 

Fett caught Din by the elbow. “Easy,” he rumbled, sounding amused. “Relax, Djarin, you’re fine.” If he was bothered by serving as a pillow for however long Din had been asleep, he didn’t show it. 

Din shook his head, trying to clear away the fog of sleep, and sat up straight. His lower back protested, half-sore from his unplanned nap and half-sore from the low, throbbing ache Din could still feel in his leg. “Sorry,” Din said. His face was still bare. The coolness of the air against his exposed cheeks made him twitch. His eyes darted up to Fett’s, which were dark and hard to read, and then away. “I’m -- I didn’t mean to fall asleep.”

Fett frowned. “Hey,” he said, and he gripped the back of Din’s neck, gentle but firm. He was still wearing gloves but his fingers were warm, even as they disturbed the bacta patch still stuck to the back of Din’s head. 

The touch wasn’t like how it had been before, around the front of Din’s throat, but it wasn’t unlike how it had been either. The touch was grounding, rooting. Fett’s hand was broad and strong. 

Fett shook Din very gently, like a loth-wolf scruffing its cubs. “Easy,” Fett repeated. “I don’t mind. It happens, sometimes.” 

Din snorted. He doubted that. 

“It does,” Fett said. “This sort of thing--” he didn’t need to describe what _this sort of thing_ was, not when Din could still feel the echo of Fett’s weight bearing down on him, driving a bruise into his bones “--it takes a lot out of you. If you need to close your eyes a bit after and rest, it doesn’t bother me. I’ve spent an hour in worse places.”

 _An hour,_ Din thought, still too embarrassed to look Fett in the eyes. Fett kept his hand on the back of Din’s neck, tugging idly at a few tangled strands of hair that curled against Din’s skin. 

“You get a lot of sleep lately, Djarin?” Fett asked, after it became clear to him that Din didn’t know what else he could say.

Din shrugged. He hadn’t slept well even before the light cruiser, not unless he’d been down in the covert surrounded by the tribe. Getting too comfortable anywhere -- even on the _Razor Crest_ in the depths of space -- was a good way for a Mandalorian to get killed.

Sleep on the light cruiser came only in fits and spurts, and usually after Din exhausted himself fighting a headache, if it came at all. 

Fett _hmm_ ed thoughtfully. “I don’t sleep well either,” he confessed. “Still, it’s good to get an hour or two in wherever you can, yeah? How do you feel?”

“I’m fine,” said Din automatically. He _was_ fine. Sore and tired, still blurred, and he knew that as soon as he stood up his leg would come back awake loudly, but Din was -- fine. Better than he’d been in a while, if he was being honest. His low, ever-present headache had faded to a faint pressure at the base of his skull, soothed by Fett’s warm hand, and his sense of balance was more or less intact. The nap had even managed to balm some of the heavy weariness in Din’s limbs. 

“Fine,” Din repeated. 

Fett watched him for a moment, and then nodded. “How’s this?” he asked, and skimmed his other hand down the length of Din’s thigh from hip to knee. Din sucked in a breath, surprised -- even the light touch through his kute woke all the nerves in his leg, a banked fire roaring back to full height. Din reached out and clutched the edge of the counter again involuntarily. The tension made his arm ache. 

“Needs bacta, then,” said Fett, decisive. “Back straight, Djarin. Don’t fall over.” The order was given gently but it was still an order. Din obeyed as involuntarily as he’d gripped the counter. Fett let go and eased himself out of the circle of Din’s arms. Without the support Din swayed a little before locking his back. The loss of contact made a small noise build up in the back of his throat, which Din passed off as a hiss of pain. 

“Come on, up you get,” Fett said, offering a hand. “I don’t keep bacta down here -- not my usual spot for a scene, you know?” 

Din didn’t know, and he eyed Fett’s offered hand like it was a spit viper puffing up to strike. 

“I’m fine,” Din said for a third time. Fett only arched a scarred eyebrow. The expression on his face made Din want to prove Fett wrong, so he took a breath, steeled himself, and used his grip on the counter to haul himself up to his feet. 

Red lights flashed around the edges of his vision. Din gritted his teeth and swallowed the sound he wanted to make, half-whine and half-growl of pain. His legs held him up, though. Din met Fett’s eyes briefly. 

_See?_ He wanted to say. _Fine._

“Stubborn,” Fett only said, though he sounded fond. “Can you walk?” 

Din was less sure of his legs if he didn’t have the counter to hold him up, but he was _fine,_ and he was going to prove it. He let go, the tension making pain sing up his right arm, and took a step away from the counter. 

_I feel like a bantha calf,_ he thought, wobbling a little, but he didn’t pitch forward and his knees held, even though the ache in his thigh burned into true pain for a moment and his breath caught in his throat. 

“Very good,” said Fett. “C’mon, I’ll get you settled.” 

Fett bent and collected Din’s helmet off the floor and offered it to Din, gathering his own off the counter and tucking it underneath an arm. “We’ll be going back through about half the palace,” he explained. “Usually me and Fennec are the only ones moving this time of night, but just in case. If you want to.” 

Din took the helmet and studied it for a second. Its smooth, silver face was as inscrutable as always. 

_I shouldn’t,_ Din thought, like he thought every time, and then he put the helmet back on anyway, though he left the seal disengaged. Fett scooped up Din’s thigh plate too, though this he kept. Din’s helmet whirred softly, the internal controls recalibrating as it adjusted to being back on Din’s head. His visor flickered.

“Still fine?” Fett asked, eyes glittering as he watched Din take a few tentative steps. Din’s leg protested every movement, but the pain was manageable. Shockingly so, given how extensive it was. 

_Fett knows what he’s doing,_ Din thought. He shivered a little, gut tightening. How much practice did someone have to have before they learned how to cause pain that effectively? Din had known plenty of beings who had loved to cause pain, of course, but that had been different -- Fett wasn’t cruel. He wasn’t causing pain to prove his own strength, or at least Din didn’t think he was. 

_Maybe he is cruel,_ Din thought, trying to parse out the confusion of feelings in his head, his chest. Each step he took felt like the last step Din could possibly take, but he forced his body to keep going. They left the kitchens, Fett at Din’s elbow, and somehow, Din knew that Fett would catch Din if he stumbled. 

_Maybe he’s cruel and kind._ Stranger things had happened in the galaxy. Din didn’t understand how Fett could be both so easily, but Din didn’t understand a lot of things that were true, like the existence of Jedi or different Ways of the Mandalore. He could handle this difference, if only just.

Fett guided Din through the palace to a lift that he opened with a press of his hand on a scanner. True to Fett’s guess, no one was moving in the palace. Din wasn’t sure exactly how late it was into the night -- it had been fully dark when he and Fett had sparred together, and Din had slept an hour, so they couldn’t be too far off from sunsrise -- but the whole palace was still and quiet, the lights turned low. 

Din put his tangle of thoughts aside and focused on staying upright as the lift climbed upwards, upright as it stopped, upright as the doors opened and Din found himself once again in Fett’s wide, airy rooms. 

Din balked. 

Fett rolled his eyes. “C’mon, let me patch you up, Djarin,” he said. “The bacta patches you’re using on yourself are expired.” 

“I’m fine,” Din said. He didn’t want to step into Fett’s rooms, not with exhaustion still pulling at his limbs, with the memory of Fett’s hand around his throat stirring something hot and excited in Din’s belly. 

_Kark, what’s wrong with me?_ Din wondered. 

“Ten minutes,” Fett bargained, though there was a thread of steel moving underneath his tone. “Let me make sure you’re back in fighting shape, then you can go off wherever you’d like, though I still need to pay you for Zhalto.” 

Din’s stomach jolted at the mention of Zhalto -- he’d forgotten that he’d brought the Zygerrian in. “Oh,” Din said. “Right.” 

Fett rolled his eyes. “Grab a seat over there,” he said, pointing to an overturned crate by the edge of the room, where the desert lay sprawled a breathless drop beyond it. Din’s heart eased, a little. 

_At least I can go out the window, if I need to,_ Din thought wryly. 

He was being unnecessarily skittish. Wariness was good in the field, but a warrior who couldn’t feel safe among the tribe was a warrior walking the way of the wurrek -- no good for anything but mindless aggression, as soon to lash out at friends and allies as an enemy. 

Fett was no more Din’s tribe than Kryze was, but he was as close to an ally as Din had anymore. 

_He’s seen my face._

Din followed Fett and sat where Fett indicated. Fett made a pleased sound that Din determinedly ignored. 

“Can I see?” Fett asked, after leaving Din for a moment to rummage around, emerging with a roll of sticky bacta gauze and a hypospray. Din eyed the needle. He’d always hated needles. 

Fett stopped a few paces away from Din. “Can I see?” he repeated. 

Din realized, abruptly, that Fett meant that he wanted to see the bruise, which meant that Din would need to take off his kute. Alarm went through him like a blaster bolt. More beings had seen Din’s body than his face -- he’d been patched up by others before, and the rules surrounding one’s body weren’t as strict as the ones around showing one’s face -- but it still wasn’t _encouraged_ by the Creed, and Din wasn’t sure he wanted to be that vulnerable around Fett. 

_You fell asleep on his chest,_ Din reminded himself. He’d let Fett hurt him, and had let Fett see him without his helmet on. Din couldn’t really be more vulnerable around Fett -- he’d done it already. 

Din peeled off his gloves first, then his gauntlets, released the seals on his pieces of armor one by one. Pauldrons, cuirass, the guards on his legs and the jetpack over his back, going until Din had a tidy heap of beskar at his feet. His hands came up to his helmet and hesitated again, almost like they had a will of their own, but Din had been through this already tonight and didn’t have any more patience for it. He shed his helmet too, ignoring the weight of Fett’s eyes on him while he did it, and tried not to think about the fact that now he had to use two hands to count how many times he’d shown a living thing his face. 

Once he’d taken the armor off, Din undid the clasps of his kute and slid out of them with practiced, warlike efficiency. Fett’s rooms were cool with desert night air and a chill broke out down Din’s bare arms and legs, but he ignored it. 

Fett whistled softly, and Din looked down. His underclothes were rumpled and tacky -- he really did need a sonic -- and the bruise Fett had worked so diligently into Din’s thigh stretched red and angry from underneath the edge of his underclothes to the top of his knee. 

“That’s a nasty scar,” Fett remarked. His voice was hoarse. 

A puckered scar, flushed red and furious, marred the outside of Din’s leg. It had healed badly and the ridge of it was ugly and fearsome. 

“It’s not that bad,” Din said, because despite the scar’s appearance it had never really hurt. He studied the bruise. Without any bacta to soothe it, it was still pink and red, hot to the touch. Within a day Din knew it would deepen to a purple so dark it would be nearly black, edged with blue that would fade to green and yellow. Fett had done his work well. Instead of a great swollen lump left by the impact of Fett’s _gaderffii_ , the bruise was even all over, layered into Din’s muscle instead of heaped together in a mess of broken capillaries. 

He didn’t want any bacta. 

Din licked his dry lips and looked up at Fett again. “I’m fine,” he said. 

Fett looked back. His eyes were wide and glittering, and if Din didn’t know any better, he’d think that Fett looked hungry. 

“Show me your wrist,” Fett said. 

Din did, lifting his right arm for inspection. His arm too had its scars; the precise cuts from the surgery to screw plates in, a smattering of burns, a gash near his elbow that had healed silver and smooth. His knuckles had been split a thousand times and Din had almost no feeling in the littlest finger on that hand because he’d nearly lost it trying to repair an engine failure aboard the _Crest_ through rough skies. 

The old bacta patch was still stuck to the back of his wrist. A bruise peeked out beneath hit, darker and richer than it had been before. Bacta sped up healing, put a bruise through days of repair in a matter of hours, so instead of being as red and raw as the one covering his thigh, Din’s wrist was blue and green. 

Fett drew a little closer to inspect the bruises for himself, and then nodded and, to Din’s enormous relief, tucked the hypo away. “You should be fine with just patches,” Fett allowed, peeling a few out of the thick wad of bacta gel in his hands. “You’ve earned the right to keep them for a bit, anyway, if that’s what you’re into.” 

“I’m not --” Din started, annoyed, but then he stopped himself. He _did_ want to keep the bruises. Bruises and scars were marks of battles won, injuries survived. 

“It’s alright,” Fett said easily. “Not everyone wants their marks gone so soon after they’ve earned them.” 

Din was quiet at that, turning that over. He wondered if Fett meant that Theran liked to be healed as soon as Fett was done -- helping. How many other beings Fett had done this for.

“Can I?” Fett asked, holding out a bacta patch. 

Din nodded. 

He had had brothers and sisters care for his injuries before. It was a sort of ritual among the covert. Those who stayed behind to train or care for the kids tended to the _beroya_ who were injured hunting or fighting; Din had been patched up more times than he could count, Paz’s gloves brushing his elbows, Annika’s gruff words washing over him while she soldered a wound, and he’d done his fair share of patching up others too.

Letting Fett study Din’s injuries wasn’t too different from that. Fett was proper about it, at least. He kept his gloves on, brushing a very careful hand over the swollen bruise on Din’s leg, mindful of Din’s warning hiss when Fett pushed a little too hard. 

“Hold still,” Fett murmured. Din obeyed again -- it was easy to listen to Fett, Din was finding -- and let Fett lay three long, cool strips of bacta down the length of Din’s thigh, following the groups of battered muscles. One strip for his outer leg, following that old, wicked scar. One for the inside, following the ache that had spread to pool around Din’s knee. The last laid diagonal across Din’s leg, from the outside of his hip to the inside of his knee. 

The relief was immediate. Fett’s bacta certainly hadn’t been swiped from a mark’s nest while on a hunt. Din sighed, the bacta cool and numbing. He had a while before it sank all the way down to the deepest part of the hurt, but Din didn’t mind. 

“Your wrist?” Fett asked. 

Din gave Fett his hand. Fett’s gloves were skin-warm. Din tried not to startle at the contrast in sensations, the coolness spreading across his leg, the heat encircling his wrist. Fett’s hands were a warrior’s hands, big and broad. Fett probed around Din’s wrist for a moment, ignoring Din as he winced and shifted whenever Fett’s fingers found a sore tendon or swollen joint. 

“What happened?” Fett finally asked. “I didn’t do this.” 

“Zhalto did,” Din said. “Lucky shot with the back end of a blaster. He caught me between my gauntlet and my handguard.” 

Fett made a little _hmm_ sound, face tightening with displeasure. “You hit him back?” 

Din touched the tiny scar between his eyes with his other hand, offering Fett a crooked smile. “Got him with a _mirshmure’cya_ ,” he said, reaching for one of the few words he remembered from the Fighting Corps. Slamming heads was a tried and true technique among Din’s covert and had been encouraged among the foundlings. 

Fett chuckled, a raspy sound. “ _Jate,_ ” he said. “Nothing’s broken, I don’t think.

“Nothing the darktrooper didn’t break, anyway,” said Din, flexing his fingers against Fett’s loose grip. 

“You get the all-clear from that med droid, by the way?” Fett asked. He sounded casual, but DIn scowled anyway. 

“Yes,” he said, resisting the urge to pull his arm out of Fett’s and tuck it to his chest. It didn’t even hurt that much, not really. “The pins held up, anyway. Zhalto just got lucky.” 

Fett _hmm_ ed again. “And your head? Still got headaches, I see.” 

The old bacta patch was still stuck to the back of Din’s neck, tangled in his hair. Din shrugged with one shoulder. 

“If you say it’s fine, _Djar’ika,_ we’re going to have to talk,” Fett warned, though a smile was tugging the corner of his scarred mouth. 

Din flushed at the endearment again. _Probably why he used it,_ he thought, grouchy. He hadn’t been called anything like that in -- well, since he’d been a child in the Corps. The older kids had called him _Din’ika_ until he’d grown enough to wipe them across the training ring. A few warriors had called him _gal’ika,_ little hawk, and he’d tolerated that well enough until he’d come into his majority because their respect and affection had been hard-won. Those warriors had all died off, though, and now Din was one of the elders in his covert. Elders didn’t get affectionate nicknames, and if they got mocking ones most were wise enough to keep the name out of Din’s ears. 

“I was cleared,” Din said. 

“But you get headaches?” 

Reluctantly, Din nodded. 

“How bad?” 

“Managable.” 

“Talkative, aren’t you?” Fett said. He took another long strip of bacta and wrapped it around Din’s wrist, tossing the old patch away and wrapping the long tails of the bacta strip up around Din’s thumb to anchor it. “Any other problems? Nausea, vertigo?” 

Din pressed his lips together and looked away, out across the desert. Thin grey strips of dawn were pushing up through a blue-black sky, the first of the two suns slowly beginning its climb over the horizon. 

“I’ve been knocked around in the head a time or two myself, you know,” Fett pointed out. 

Din thought about the massive dent in Fett’s helmet. He didn’t know what had to hit beskar that hard to leave such a mark, but he was sure that whatever it was had also left its mark on Fett. 

“So I have I,” said Din shortly. He thought about Nevarro and the siege on Carga’s cantina. The blood in his eyes, IG-11 looming over him. “This wasn’t… that bad, comparatively.” 

“You spent three days in bacta.” 

Din scowled again. 

Satisfied that he’d wrapped up Din’s wrist well enough, Fett took his hands away and held them up in surrender. “Just saying,” he said. “We don’t exactly have Imperial-grade bacta tanks out here. So if you’re more hurt than you’re telling me and you keel over in the sonic, your only option’s to let Ushib take a bone saw to the back of your head.” 

Din winced. If they couldn’t get their hands on any bacta, the Tuskens handled head injuries by cutting out circular pieces of the skull to relieve the pressure. 

“I was cleared,” he repeated. “The med droid -- it was giving me bacta boosters for a while, but I don’t need them. It’s fine. It’s just… something to live with until it heals.” 

“Mmm. Well, if you feel like your brain’s about to start coming out your ears, tell one of us before it actually happens,” Fett said. He bent and scooped up Din’s discarded kute, offering it back. “The rest of you’s fine. You can take the bacta off after a few hours. It’ll hold up in a sonic. Where’re you resting your boots?” 

Din took his kute back gratefully and kitted back up slowly, settling back into his flightsuit and then his armor piece by piece. “Downstairs, off the throne room,” he said. 

Fett snorted. “Those’re a mess, still,” he said. “Here, take the lift three floors down. There’s room there, and the ‘fresher works. Caf machine should work too, and the bed’s been cleaned.” 

“I’m --” Din started, but stopped himself before he could say _fine_ and make Fett roll his eyes. 

“It’s one below Fennec,” Fett supplied. “And we’re still the only ones who’ve got access to the lift -- c’mere, I’ll code you in too so you can move around when you like -- so you won’t be bothered.” 

Din had to admit to himself that he _did_ like the sound of that. A working sonic was all he really wanted right now, but the guarantee of privacy, at least from other beings, was good too. 

“Fine,” he said. 

Fett smiled. “Good. I hold court for a few hours every morning and every evening, but you can come back up here after sunsheight and I’ll get you paid up for Zhalto. There’s no kitchen service in this tower, but I can have Ushib send you up something to eat.” 

“I’ll be alright,” said Din, a little overwhelmed by Fett’s easy care. He pulled his helmet back on to hide his expression, which Din worried might be too wide-eyed and unsure. “Thank you.” 

“I take care of my people,” said Fett. Din couldn’t help but perk up a little at that -- _my people._

Fett had Din strip off a glove -- Din used his left hand, his right now thoroughly numb -- and press it to the scanner in front of the lift. There was a hum and a flash of light while Fett punched a few buttons on the side of the panel, and then the lift made a soft chime and the doors slid open. 

“There you are.” Fett clapped Din across the back. “Go rest, Djarin. We can talk later, if you have -- well. If you want to.” 

Din just nodded. Uneasiness flickered around the edges of his thoughts. Fett wanted to talk about the kitchens. About pain. 

_It was good,_ Din told himself, stepping into the lift and letting it whisk him away before Fett could scent out Din’s discomfort like a massif. It had been -- well. Din had never had his thoughts completely stilled like that before. He’d never had pain so focused, so deliberate, that it had drowned out everything else. 

Din could still feel the lingering edges of that calm, blunted place inside of him, if he looked for it. 

_It felt like… It felt like running through a_ par. Like moving through a full form under the eyes of one of his instructors, his whole world pared down to encompass only his body and the weight of a weapon in his hands, every motion easy and instinctive. 

_Do I want Fett to do it again?_

Din resolved to think about it after he’d had a sonic and maybe another nap. The accidental sleep he’d had in the kitchens had refreshed him a little bit, but an hour sleeping on another man’s chest was not a full cycle’s sleep in a safe place, and Fett’s tower was probably the safest place in the palace. 

The lift doors chimed again and the lift came to a smooth stop, the doors opening onto another large, round room. This one wasn’t open to the air like Fett’s, though Din didn’t mind. A long, low window wrapped around nearly the entire room, which was circular like Fett’s and set up much the same; a low bed sunk into the central pillar, the space divided into sleeping and work quarters by durasteel beams, the only true walls the ones surrounding what Din assumed was the private ‘fresher, a few steps from the end of the bed. 

Din stumbled towards the ‘fresher gratefully, shedding armor now that he knew he was alone. His kute and the rest of his clothes soon followed. The darksaber clattered when it hit the ground. The spear rattled. The sonic was old-fashioned but perfectly functional. The frequency made Din so dizzy he had to step out to be sick twice, even with a hand over his ear to block out the worst of the noise, but Din didn’t even really mind. He was relieved to finally be _clean,_ the grime and dust of space travel and the desert shaken off his body. 

Once he’d cleaned himself off, he limped out, collected his kute and clothes, and held them in the sonic for a while, watching the sand and dirt vibrate off into nothingness. Standing outside of the sonic didn’t make Din sick, so he left the sonic on, kute inside, and used the meager trickle of water coming out of the sink to rinse out his mouth and splash his face off, working dampness through his hair. 

He ran a hand over his jaw absently. His throat was red where Fett had grabbed it. He hadn’t squeezed very hard so Din didn’t know if it would bruise, but the skin was tender to the touch. 

He touched the edges of his scruffy beard. Patches of it were missing. Din didn’t know why -- he’d never grown a full beard, not like he’d seen some humanoids wear. One corner or other of his jaw always stayed bare. He tugged a few strands of hair. He was scruffier than he liked to be. On the _Crest_ he’d kept himself fairly neat, as demanded by Creed -- a warrior took care of their body, because their body was a tool and tools, like beskar, were kept in good condition. 

It had been hard to find the time to take care of everything, after Tython. Din had been so busy rallying allies, hunting Gideon, that he hadn’t stopped to trim his beard or his hair, which now was long enough to brush his ears and curl at the base of his neck.

After the mess with Gideon, Din’d had the time but not the interest. What was the point in adhering to a Creed Din had broken? Keeping his hair and beard trimmed in the warrior’s fashion was just as much a mockery as pulling the helmet back on every time Din took it off.

But Din was too tired to deal with that circular, thorny path of logic, and he looked a mess. Pale, exhausted, unkempt, hair everywhere, shadows under his eyes. He reached for the blunted, calm place inside of himself and dug around in the cabinet under the sink. He didn’t find a razor or a vibroblade, but he found what looked like a Wookiee’s clippers. The energy pack in them was still good, so Din moved slowly and trimmed down the roughest patches of his beard. He left his hair as it was, still damp and curling everywhere. He could cut it later.

By the time Din left the ‘fresher, the suns were clearing the horizon. He didn’t care. He took the three steps necessary to get to the bed and collapsed into it, groaning at its softness. 

His arm hurt. His leg hurt. But his head, still fuzzy and warm, didn’t, so Din took the rare opportunity presented to him and closed his eyes, slipping easily, for once, into sleep. 

Din woke up some time later to bright sunlight and a dry mouth. His wrist didn’t hurt anymore but his leg did, and when he stirred against the bed all the nerves sparked awake.

“Dank _ferrik,_ ” Din growled, screwing his eyes shut. He breathed through it, forcing air through his teeth, and let the pain subside into something more manageable. 

When he risked moving again, pain flared up his spine but Din pushed through it, rolling over onto his left side, then propping himself upright, shifting all of his weight to his other leg. 

The bacta patches had done a good job. In the handful of hours Din had slept--five or six, if the position of the suns was anything to go by--the bruise around Din’s wrist had aged a week. It was green and yellow now, the swelling all but gone, and when he flexed each of his fingers he found that they could move more or less without pain, though a deeper ache in his forearm persisted. 

_The pins,_ he thought. Bacta patches were good at surface-level healing, at bruises, inflammation. Shattered bones, less so. 

His leg looked better, too, though the bruise itself was still deep, night-sky blue. Only the very edges of it had started to fade to green. 

_You’ve earned the right to keep them,_ Fett had said. Din carefully prodded the edges of the bruise, shivering a little as pain throbbed through him. Fett had meant that, then. He’d given Din enough bacta to still be able to move his leg, but no so much that the bruise faded to nothing but an irritation. 

Din curled his fingers underneath the edge of one of the bacta strips and hesitated, before he shook his head to clear it and pulled the strip off, starting with the outside of his thigh and moving in. He left the bacta on his wrist where it was.

Task done, Din carefully stood, testing his weight. Pain barked up his spine, but he didn’t wobble. If anything, his body came alive, heart rate picking up, breath quickening. Other, smaller hurts were crowded out by the building burn Fett had pressed into Din’s skin. 

Din pressed his fingers to the edge of the bruise again. A sound built in his throat, and he realized suddenly, sharply, that he was still naked. 

Arousal slammed into him like the kickback from a pulse rifle. His blood thundered. His skin grew warm underneath his touch. 

Din forced a breath out, surprised. He’d never -- he had poked and prodded hundreds of his own bruises over the years. Thousands. He’d had worse than this bruise Fett had given him, much worse. He’d been shot and stabbed and burned, electrocuted, poisoned, slashed, cut. Nothing had ever effected him like this. 

_Nothing else was ever this intentional._

Oh, he’d been hurt plenty of times by beings intending to hurt him. His teachers had used pain as a guide. His enemies as a deterrent. But Din had never had anyone use pain to _help_ him. To settle his thoughts, to ground him. Only Fett had done that. 

Din couldn’t help himself. So many thoughts and feelings were skittering around underneath his skin, a noise rising and clanging like beskar struck behind his teeth. His heart leapt up into his throat. 

He grabbed at the bruise blindly, fingers digging in. White fire blinded him; Din thought that he shouted. 

He didn’t know what to do with the fact that his cock was hard. 

Din had never spent much time bumping beskar no matter what Xi’An had liked to imply. Most of the young warriors in the covert had fumbled around with each other a time or two, Din included, but it had never been something Din had actively sought out, and by the time he’d been out on his own most of the time, his will had been strong enough that he could ignore most stirrings of arousal. 

But this -- this was something else. This was something different. 

He let go of his bruised thigh, gasping for breath. The ache of it burned through him, fierce as a dragon. If Din concentrated, he could still feel the echoes of Fett’s gloves on him. Fett’s fingers curling underneath Din’s jaw. 

Din closed his eyes, teeth gritted, and counted down from the highest number he knew in Rodian. When that did nothing to settle the energy underneath his skin or to soften the swell of his cock, Din did the same thing in Huttese. He curled his hands at his sides. 

That didn’t work either. Arousal and pain burned low together in his belly, a simmer that rose and rose every time he tried to turn his thoughts aside. 

Din swore, softly. 

_Is this how Theran feels?_ He wondered, then immediately cursed himself for wondering. As soon as he thought about Theran he thought about Fett, about the whip, the marks, the _noises_ \-- Din couldn’t help but think of Fett offering Din pain in the kitchens, couldn’t help wonder what it would feel like to have Fett lick stripes over Din’s back, his ribs, the meat of his shoulders. Din bit the inside of his cheek, but not even that helped. 

_Jate,_ Fett would say. Din could hear the warmth in his memory. _Ori'jate._

“ _Dank ferrik,”_ Din growled. 

He spat in his palm, feeling like an anooba panting after anything that moved, and took himself in his hand. 

He had to climb back in the sonic after. The vibrations made him nauseous again, but this time Din didn’t mind. 

_That’s what I get for losing discipline like an untried apprentice,_ Din thought, frustrated with himself. Grabbing his leg hadn’t helped anything either -- Din had held on tight enough to spark new, fresh pain, and he limped a little as he left the ‘fresher and began the familiar ritual of pulling his armor back on. 

Din knew that a sonic cleaned a being off just as well as a water shower, but he still washed his hands a few more times before he touched the smooth, shiny plates of beskar to fit them into the circuitry of his kute. 

By the time he was fully armored, spear on his back, darksaber at his hip and on his way out of the room, pulling off his glove again to get the lift to work, Din had mastered the limp and gotten the skittish, buzzing sensation in his chest and his hands under control. 

When the second lift opened on the palace’s main floor and Din set off in the direction of the throne room, he did so smoothly, without a hitch in his step or any slowness to betray his lingering pain.

 _At least I can muster up that much control,_ he thought wryly. 

There were more beings moving about in the halls today. A dull silver protocol droid, the Wookiee hunter Kasyyk, a trio of jawas. 

The throne room was busier too, though it was still subdued from Jabba’s day. There was no band this time, just knots of Tatooinians clustered together around the bar and the tables and the alcoves, talking amongst themselves while Fett sat sprawled across his throne. 

Din nodded at Fett as he entered, making for the bar. Noora the Twi’Lek was tending again, and she smiled when she saw Din. “What can I get’cha?” she asked. “Alderaanian wine, maybe? We’ve got a couple of good vintages left. Spotchka?” 

“Water, please,” Din said. He grimaced under his helmet. “With a straw, if you’ve got one.” 

Noora’s eyes roamed over Din’s helmet. “For you, sweetheart, we’ve got whatever you need,” she said. 

Din rolled his eyes. 

The water was sweet and cold, though, once Noora’d poured him a glass and slid a little reed straw into it. Din disengaged his helmet’s seal and took a drink. Some of the others at the bar watched him out of the corners of their eyes, but no one tried anything. 

“Anything to eat?” Noora asked. 

Din was still faintly nauseous from the sonic, his stomach weak. He shook his head.

Noora shrugged. “Yell if you change your mind,” she said, and turned her attention to a human who was loudly demanding another cup of spotchka. 

Din turned his attention to the proceedings in the center of the throne room. 

Fett was different, holding court. Din watched him for a while, trying to piece it together. 

It wasn’t that Fett was cruel or pompous or any of the things Jabba the Hutt had been. Jabba’s court had been a jumble of noise and backbiting and casual hate. Jabba had wanted to be entertained. If he couldn’t wring enough amusement out of his terrified guests, he’d get it by dropping one of his guards down to the rancor or beating one of the dancing girls or forcing two of his hunters to fight each other in front of him while the rest of the room made bets. 

Fett didn’t do any of that. He was all business, attentive and alert. Serious. He weighed every request put before him with inscrutable calm. 

_But he’s distant,_ Din thought, watching Fett sort out a dispute between two spice runners who claimed that the other had stolen their particular patch. 

Fett sat in Jabba’s throne like a mountain sat in the middle of the desert. Distant and strange, remote and untouchable. Everyone in the room felt it and either made too much or too little noise. 

The only person who didn’t seem at all bothered what Fennec, who perched on the arm of Fett’s throne and watched everyone with cool eyes, pulse rifle across her lap. 

_They’re still expecting an attack,_ Din realized. Fett’s footing wasn’t as strong as Fett wanted his court to think. Fett and Fennec were prepared for someone -- the Hutts, a rival, an assassin -- to burst in and start shooting. Fett was distant because half his attention, hidden behind his helmet, was on the staircase. 

Without pausing to think about it, Din rolled up from the bar, leaving his glass behind, and padded over to the staircase, where he took up a post leaning against the wall, facing the throne. Anyone who burst down the steps and made for Fett would have to pass Din, and Din had a spear and good reflexes. 

Fett’s helmet tilted in Din’s direction, questioning. Din didn’t move, just propped his sore leg up on his good one and settled deeper into the wall. 

Fennec, her eyes on a knot of Rodians by the bar, half-smiled. 

The rest of the court session -- Din wasn’t really sure what to call it. A hearing? An audience? -- passed quickly. Fett sorted the spice traders out handily enough. He accepted the loyalty of two humans who pledged themselves as scouts, put Kasyyk the Wookiee on a hunt after a Twi’Lek from Mos Eisley came forward and said her daughter had been captured by slavers and collected taxes from three cantina owners in the city. Two of them even paid up without a fuss. The third, a Zeltron with an attitude problem, tried to bluster his way out of it, until Fennec pulled a small blaster from her boot and shot him in the knee. 

He paid after that and was pulled from the room by two other Zeltrons, cursing. 

Fett climbed to his feet as the Zeltron’s curses still echoed up the stairs. He gestured to Fennec, who slid into Fett’s throne with all the grace of a very large predator, and Fett made his way over to DIn, who stayed where he was. 

“I have bodyguards, you know,” said Fett, his tone muffled by his helmet. 

Din shrugged. “None of them have a spear.” 

That made Fett laugh. Din smiled to himself, pleased, and pointedly ignored the flicker of interest stirring in his belly. 

“How’re you feeling?” Fett asked. “Good?”

“Good,” said Din, skirting the word _fine._ Fett didn’t seem to like it much. 

“You like the room?”

“I liked the sonic,” Din admitted, which made Fett chuckle again, like Din had told a clever joke instead of an admittedly sly truth. “Bed wasn’t bad, either. Better than anything on the light cruiser.” 

“Yeah, the Imps’ve always had some strange grudge against being comfortable,” Fett said. “Saw you over with Noora. You get enough to eat? To drink?” 

“I’m fighting fit,” said Din. 

Fett made another one of his little _hmm_ noises, this one low enough to be barely more than a crackle in his vocoder. “Want to head back upstairs, then?” 

Din’s stomach plunged. 

“Still got to see you paid,” Fett said. Din flushed, embarrassed -- of course Fett wanted to talk business. He’d said as much last night -- or this morning, whichever it had been. He’d wanted to pay Din after holding court for the morning. Judging by the light slanting in through the windows, they were well on their way to afternoon now. 

“Lead the way,” said Din gruffly, letting his vocoder bleed the embarrassment out of his voice. 

Fett nodded and waited for Din to peel himself off the wall. They left the throne room together. 

“You’re walking well,” Fett remarked, as they moved towards the first lift together. “How’s the bruise?” 

Din checked the hall, alarmed, but saw that they were alone. “It’s alright,” he said, still avoiding _fine._ “The bacta healed it up enough to walk on.” 

“You still have any bacta on?” 

“Just this.” Din lifted his right arm half-heartedly. Fett cut him a glance Din could feel even through his helmet. “I didn’t need the patches on my leg anymore,” he defended himself. “I -- it did its job.” 

“You sleep at all?”

“I did,” Din admitted, thrown. He didn’t see why Fett would care. 

“More than an hour?” 

Din flushed again, remembering the feel of Fett’s beskar, cool against his face. “More than an hour,” he said. 

“Good,” said Fett, sounding satisfied. Din couldn’t fathom why he’d be satisfied, either, but he was starting to realize that Fett was a mystery Din might never unravel. That was alright. Mandalorians were odd as a general rule, and without a tribe of his own, Fett had likely only gotten odder. 

_I wonder what happened to his people?_ Fett had said that he’d “had enough of brothers.” Had there been too many in his clan, too little glory to go around? Had they fought amongst themselves and ripped their tribe apart? 

Some coverts had gone that way, over the years. Din’s _alor_ had been good at rooting out tension before it could fester and split, like a wound gone rotten, but other coverts in the network hadn’t had such luck or skilled leadership. 

“You given any more thought to what we talked about last night?” Fett asked. 

Din blinked and pulled himself out of his own head with some effort. “What?” 

“What we talked about,” said Fett patiently. He opened the first lift and ushered Din inside, and they began to climb Jabba’s old tower. “About pain. Did you like it? Did it help?”

“Did I like it,” Din repeated, flatly. Yes, he’d liked it. _Stars help me, I liked it._ He’d come in his hand just an hour ago thinking about it. He could still feel Fett’s fingers on either side of his throat. 

Fett just looked at him, expressionless and patient. 

Din blew out a crackly breath. “Can we… talk after?” he asked, trying to buy himself time to order his thoughts. If he started talking now, DIn was afraid that words will fall off his tongue before he could catch them. He was afraid of showing Fett too much. Of saying the wrong thing. “I don’t -- it’s personal. And this,” he gestured at the lift, still climbing up, “is work.” 

“Ah,” said Fett, nodding. “Yeah, I get it. Yeah, we can talk after. Really, though, you slept well?”

“Better than I usually do,” Din admitted. He couldn’t be sure, but he thought that Fett stood a little straighter at that, pleased and proud. Din flexed his fingers just to feel something aside from nerves and apprehension. 

_I’m no good at this._

He shouldn’t have stayed in that kitchen. He should’ve tackled Fett and bolted, made his apologies in the throne room later. Staying had shown Fett too much. 

But Fett was apparently content to let the matter lie, because he didn’t mention it again as the lift stopped and they crossed the hall to Fett’s turret together, climbing into the second lift and taking it up to Fett’s open rooms. 

“While we were beating the kriff out of each other, Fennec was playing with Zhalto,” Fett said as the lift doors opened. “He sang like a karking shriek-hawk. You did good bringing him in.” 

It was DIn’s turn to stand straighter, pleased. “He didn’t give me that much trouble,” he demurred, though the praise settled behind his chest and glowed. 

“He is terrified of you,” said Fett, amused. He guided Din over to the workbench, still talking. “Seems to think you’re a Tusken under all that beskar.” 

“I… told him that I was,” Din said. “A Tusken, I mean. We saw a raider up on a ridge coming out of the canyons.” 

“He didn’t shoot at you?” 

Din shook his head. “No. He knew who I was. He let us go without any trouble.” 

“Then you’re Tusken enough for these parts,” said Fett. “All the tribes are on edge. Anything short of an armed caravan usually gets torn to pieces in the Great Dune Sea. Here, Djarin. Your fee, well earned.” Fett pulled a crate out from underneath the worktable and tipped it over, spilling its contents out in a song of clinking metal. 

Din pulled up short. Beskar ingots clinked and rattled. Their dark grey faces caught in the suns. Din stared at Fett. “This is too much,” he said. “This is -- this is two, three camtonos. Zhalto wasn’t worth this.” 

He wanted to reach out at touch the beskar, but he stopped himself. 

Din had never been offered this much for a single bounty before. Not even the kid -- he’d been worth a full camtono alive, and that camtono had been the single largest payout Din had ever taken. And compared to getting the kid, snagging Zhalto had been a piece of _uj’alayi._ Finding Grogu had been the work of days. Din had found Zhalto over the course of a night. 

“Maybe he was worth this much to me,” said Fett lightly. 

Din scowled at him even though Fett couldn’t see it. This wasn’t something to joke about -- this was Din’s _job._

“You dishonor me,” Din said. Fett froze. Din folded his arms across his chest, beskar clinking. It was true. Accepting this much beskar for a simple bounty made Din look greedy, like Din didn’t care about the quality of his own work or the honor in providing for his clan. 

Fett was silent for a long moment. “You’re very traditional,” he observed. Din’s shoulders tensed. Kryze and her _tal’vode_ had told him the same thing, that Din’s Way was old-fashioned, odd, unusual. Din hadn’t ever really thought about it. It was the Way. Traditional or not, it _was_ , and Din still found himself following it. 

_“Ni ceta_ ,” said Fett, formally. He inclined his head and scrubbed a hand over his scars, apologetic. “It was not my intention to offend you. Beskar is not worth as much to me as it is to you, and I miscalculated.” 

Din blinked. He knew the proper response, though as a foundling he’d always been the one apologizing. “ _Nu entye,_ ” he said. He too shifted, uncomfortable. “There are… I didn’t meet Mandalorians of other Ways until recently,” he explained. He remembered his words to Bo-Katan only a few months ago. _There is only one Way of the Mandalore._ “And I’m learning that mine is… different from other Ways. Beskar means much to my tribe.” 

_My cult._ That’s what Kryze had called Din’s Creed. The word burned in his throat like acid. Din hadn’t given it much thought. He’d been busy at the time, focused on his Quest, and while Koska Reeves had taken it upon herself to follow Din around the light cruiser and lightly point out aspects of _her_ Way, Din had done his best to avoid her. It had become a little game between them, almost, like the games of hide-and-explode Din had played in the covert as a child, except Reeves bombarded him with uncomfortable truths instead of paint grenades. 

“Still,” said Fett, “the error’s mine.” He studied the heap of beskar ingots for a moment, then picked up a stack of six. 

Din still balked. Six ingots was enough for a cuirass. “I used a lot of your fuel,” Din pointed out. 

Fett huffed. “But you were faster than expected, and you brought Zhalto back alive,” he said. “And you took an injury. Consider the extra ingot hazard pay.” 

Din bit back a snort of disbelief. _Hazard pay_ was something that Core Worlders got when they ventured into the Outer Rim, not something that a bounty hunter could collect. 

“I don’t have any other hunters on my payroll at the moment,” Fett said. “Nobody else who could’ve hunted Zhalto down for me, any way, and I can’t leave yet, my position here is too new. So consider it a premium rate, if you have to, but take the karking beskar.” 

Din examined Fett’s statement. There had been the Wookiee hunter down in the throne room the first day Din had walked into the palace, but Din didn’t know his skill level. If Fett himself couldn’t leave and go hunting, that would make Din the most skilled hunter available. The most skilled were the highest paid. That was true everywhere. 

“Fine,” Din said. “Six ingots.” 

Fett handed over the stack, still looking like he couldn’t believe he’d had this argument. Din, however, was pleased. Six ingots was generous -- almost too generous -- but still reasonable enough that Din couldn’t be accused of greed. 

The ingots were heavy in his hands. Din resisted the urge to cradle them to his chest. He was a grown warrior, not an excited foundling. 

“You have more work for me?” Din asked. 

“You sticking around?”

Din nodded.

“What about Her Majesty and her crusade?” Fett rumbled. Din winced. “She still determined to reclaim Mandalore or some other wild nerf chase?” 

“We went to Mandalore,” Din said quietly. He had to close his eyes briefly against the memory. It was still so fresh in his head that he could smell it. The beskar ingots grew exponentially heavier in his hands. “It was -- it wasn’t good. You were right. The Empire glassed the entire planet. Concordia, too, and Concord Dawn. Even the cities. There’s nothing left.”

Mandalore had been a ball of white dust. Not even sand -- sand could nurture life, if given a cool enough night and a periodic rainstorm -- but just dust and ash and bone. The cities had been cracked open like mudhorn eggs, the towns turned into craters. 

Fett was quiet too. 

Din pressed a hand against his helmet, pushing it back into his brow. He’d seen death and destruction before. His covert had made its home in all sorts of devastated places. Christophsis, Kashyyyk, Ryloth, Fest. Mandalore hadn’t even been that bad, really. On Kashyyyk they’d been able to smell the rotting Wookiees in the treetop villages below, the dying wroshyr trees, the heavy, clinging stink of sap burning in the Imperial refineries down in the valleys. 

“Kryze told me that there was a weapon,” Din said. He looked at Fett. “Designed to… to kill us. Mandalorians specifically, I mean. It targeted beskar and cooked a warrior alive inside their armor.” 

Fett nodded slowly. “I heard about that,” he said. “It wasn’t active for long, but it wiped out a good dozen of the big clans. Wren, Ordo, Awaud, Bralor, Jendri, Deshra. I know a Wren or two made it out, maybe an Ordo, but the fighting forces were decimated. Awaud lost over eight hundred warriors.”

Din flinched. Eight hundred. An unimaginable number. 

“Last I heard that the weapon was destroyed,” Fett continued. “Some Rebel squad took it out, won a lot of the survivors over to the Rebellion’s cause. The technology was lost, but before it went it did its job.”

Din thought of the skeletons on Mandalore and Concordia, so badly burnt that they had been welded to the rock. The ash that covered the entire planet. The empty beskar mines. Din had never been to Mandalore, not even as a child -- with the Clone Wars raging it had been too dangerous for his rescuers to bring him there, though they had dutifully recorded his name 

“There’s nothing left on Mandalore,” he repeated. “Kryze didn’t -- she didn’t take it well. That’s why I left when you commed. She hasn’t decided what she wants to do yet. Where she wants to go.” 

Fett cocked his head. “So you’re still with her in her quest?” he asked. 

Din nodded. “I swore it,” he said. Kryze had held up her end of the bargain. She had helped take the cruiser from Moff Gideon and protected the kid. Din was with her in her own Quest, even if hers seemed more impossible than even his had been. 

Fett shook his head. “Good luck,” he said. “You do wanna stick around, then? There’s work that needs doing.” 

Din looked pointedly at the pile of beskar. Fett grimaced. “Fair,” he conceded. “I might need more than bounty work, though.” 

“I’m no assassin,” Din said, “but I can help in other ways.” 

“Fennec’d kill me if I gave you all of her jobs anyway.” Fett cocked his head, eyes bright. “There room for you in two courts, _mand’alor?_ Kyrze’s and mine?” 

Din ignored the way that made him warm, the feeling of being wanted curling happily in his chest. “For now,” he allowed. Kryze was directionless without Mandalore, but Din had the vague suspicion that Kryze was the sort of loth-cat that always landed on its feet. She’d come up with something sooner or later, and when she did Din would be duty-bound to follow her. 

But his comms had been silent the entire time he’d been on Tatooine. Her needs, such as they were, apparently weren’t pressing.

“Good,” said Fett. “I need an emissary.” 

Din cocked his head. “A what?”

“A representative, of sorts,” Fett explained. “Someone from my outfit who can go to others, broker deals, set up trade, that kind of work. In between hunting, since that’s a bit thin on the ground at the moment.” 

Din frowned again. He thought of Kuill and the jawas. “I’m not much of a negotiator.”

“Not compared to a galactic senator or Obi-Wan karking Kenobi, no,” said Fett, as if Din had ever met any galactic senators or whoever Obi-Wan Kenobi was. “But you’re not bad, for a Mandalorian.” 

“What does _that_ mean?” 

Fett laughed. “It means you only try and solve your arguments with fire about half the time,” he said. “The other half, you’re willing to talk. And you’ve got friends around.” 

“Most of my friends are on Nevarro, in hiding or plotting to retake a glassed planet,” Din pointed out. 

“And the rest are out raiding settler farms, or running free-towns out in the Great Sand Dunes.” 

“You need me to negotiate with the Tuskens and Cobb Vanth?” 

“To start,” said Fett. He waved a hand, encompassing the palace and the desert and the planet beyond it. “Jabba kept his grip on Tatooine through fear and the backing of the Hutt Cartel. Bib Fortuna was too busy karking around with slave girls and spice to care about keeping a grip on the planet at all. I don’t keep slave girls, don’t like spice and don’t have the backing of the Hutt Cartel.” 

“So you need agreements and alliances,” Din realized, considering. Everyone on Tatooine had bowed to Jabba because if they hadn’t, Jabba would have brought the might of the cartel down on them and everyone they cared about. Fett didn’t have that power nor, Din thought privately, the inclination. He was a Mandalorian, and Mandalorians were practical. Towns that were wiped out for defiance were towns where Fett couldn’t turn a profit. 

“I do,” said Fett. “Mos Eisley fell in line quick. Having someone smart in that chair means more money for the city. Other places… haven’t quite caught on yet.” 

“Like Mos Pelgo.”

“Mos Pelgo had a bad go of it, until your Marshal friend found my _beskar’gam._ After they were one of the few settlements that could run off the slavers. They’re stubborn, tough. Other towns respect them. More than one slaving outfit’d like to nail Vanth’s skin to the wall like a prize krayt hide, but I don’t slave. If Mos Pelgo wanted to consider a trade alliance…” 

_Other towns might follow._

Din nodded. He had intended to head out and check on Mos Pelgo anyway, since he’d be in the sector. He and the kid had stayed for a few days, after Din had been swallowed by the greater krayt, and it had been a nice enough town, for Tatooine. He liked the Tuskens around Mos Pelgo too, the Sun Rock. They had been as sensible and practical as Din could hope for. 

“So you’ll go?” Fett asked. 

“I will,” Din said. He held up a finger. “ _But_ we agree on payment beforehand.” 

Fett shook his head, exasperated, but said, “Fine. Fifteen ingots if you come back with an agreement. Five if you come back empty-handed.” 

“You’ll still pay me if I come back empty-handed?”

“Sure. It’s not bounty work. I’ll throw in another ingot if you can get Cobb Vanth to come himself, though I hear he doesn’t roam far these days.” 

_Sixteen ingots of pure beskar._ Din shook his head. “It’s too much,” he protested. 

“It really isn’t,” said Fett. “If Mos Pelgo signs on and works out a trade deal with me, other settlements will fall all over themselves for the chance. I’ll be able to set whatever terms I want. We’ll get trade flowing again, credits moving through the planet. _I’ll_ get some legitimacy, beyond what I can win with my blaster.” 

Din still balked. 

“If you think you’re being overpaid because the job’s easy, think again. The Great Dune Sea’s a mess right now. Raiders, rivals, cartels. There’s a good chance you’ll be attacked going from the palace.

Din didn’t brighten at that, necessarily, since being shot at on a speeder was hardly ideal, but he did relax. Hazardous work always paid more. “Fine,” he said. “Sixteen ingots, if I can bring Vanth back here for an agreement. Fifteen if he agrees but doesn’t come, five for if he turns you down.” 

“Done,” said Fett, and like that another contract was struck. “You leave in the morning. I’ve got to draft an agreement for Vanth. You need anything else?” 

Din shook his head. He had what he needed, for now at least. His leg twinged, phantom heat stirring. “Well,” he said. “About -- what we talked about. What you showed me,” he began, but this time it was Fett who shook his head. 

“You’re working,” he said. “We can talk about it when you get back from Mos Pelgo. Would that help? We can spar, raid the kitchens again, talk about it?”

The thought of being back in those kitchens -- being under Fett’s hands again -- made DIn’s pulse quicken. His cock stirred underneath his kute. Din had to clench his hands and count down from ten, holding his breath, before he could speak. 

“Alright,” he said hoarsely. “When I -- when I get back.”

“ _Jate._ Then go rest,” Fett instructed. “Or train, or whatever you’d like to do. Ushib’ll feed you. Fennec will use you for target practice if you want a sparring partner.” 

Din didn’t snap to attention and salute like a new recruit on the training field, but he thought about it. Instead he only dipped his head, pleased with his new sense of purpose, and left Fett to his business, hands full of beskar, heading off towards the place he’d last seen Fennec Shand. 

Target practice didn’t sound half-bad. 

  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings: The beginnings of pain play; Din is in the process of figuring out his reaction to pain. Din also jacks off the shower as a direct result of pain play. 
> 
> Some notes: 
> 
> -Boba: "Okay, now we traditionally do aftercare." Din: "What the fuck is that."  
> -I know _Rebels_ is canon, and I really do like several parts of the show! Fenn Rau can apply to be my husband at any time. However, other parts of _Rebels_ make me incandescently angry (the entire Mortis Arc, and its resurgence at the end of Rebs, makes me foam at the mouth), as does the entirely of the animated TCW series, so in true SW fashion I will be cherry-picking the parts of it that I like!  
> -I don't necessarily mean to imply that Din's covert is, like, bad. Outright bad, anyway. We'll be digging in to it more later (woohoo religious trauma tag), but I _do_ think that they're Not Great, in a way that most of the Mandalorian subgroups are also Not Great. 
> 
> Your song of the week is "Boy Got It Bad," KaiL Bexley. I keep forgetting to mention it, but I do have a [tumblr](https://ryehouses.tumblr.com) that I even use occasionally! The tag for this fic (the tag is almost exclusively memes, but there's some art and inspo stuff too) is [here](https://ryehouses.tumblr.com/tagged/ast-tag). 
> 
> Thank you for reading! See you next week!


	5. tomad

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello! If we all pretend that it's Friday and my update is not late, I won't tell. 
> 
> Your response continues to blow me away! Seriously, this is a pretty niche concept, so the fact that anybody else but me wants to read it is like. Unbelievable to me. Y'all are keeping me going! 
> 
> Per request, I will start putting chapter-specific content warnings in the end notes for chapters that have scene stuff. I really don't like tagging every single act or thing that happens, both for spoiler reasons and also aesthetic ones, so I will be making extensive use of chapter-specific labels and warnings. I will be going back today/tomorrow and adding warnings to the end notes of Chapters 3 & 4\. 
> 
> Thank you, and enjoy! See ya Friday, and I mean that this time.

Mos Pelgo was so small that Din almost shot right past it. Despite what Fett had said about restless Tuskens Din’d had no trouble crossing the Dune Sea. He’d ridden easy, following the suns as they tracked across the sky, but since he’d been off-planet Din had forgotten exactly which crumbling jut of rock marked Mos Pelgo. 

_ Sleeping anooba, sleeping anooba, sleeping anooba,  _ Din thought, studying the rocks as they flashed past. The problem was that  _ anything  _ could look like a sleeping anooba, and all the red banded rocks looked more or less the same. The Tuskens believed that Tatooine had once been a lush, green planet thriving with life, but to Din it looked like the desert had been there forever, expansive and sun-blasted and maddeningly hard to navigate in. Getting between larger towns like Mos Eisley and Mos Espa was easy enough, but Mos Pelgo wasn’t on any nav charts. 

Only a frantically-waving small humanoid in white robes and googles saved Din from skimming past Mos Pelgo entirely and getting himself lost in the Dune Sea. He caught sight of the figure out of the corner of his eye, realized that the rock the figure was standing on  _ was  _ shaped like an anooba lounging in the dunes and turned off the sands. Within a few minutes Din found himself aimed for a cluster of white buildings lazing about in the long shadow of a towering red butte. 

_ Mos Pelgo.  _

Tatooine was home to thousands of towns like Mos Pelgo. Settlers would venture out into the desert, build up a few vaporators, pack together into a fistful of homes clustered around a wind-battered cantina, and scrape out a living for a generation or six. 

Then the sands would come and bury the town, or the Tuskens would push back against expansion, or the water wells would run dry and the town would whither up like a tree cut from its roots and disappear back into the sands. 

Mos Pelgo probably still had a good few years left in her, though. From what Din had seen its people were tough. Not just anyone would stay around to fight a greater krayt dragon, after all. Mos Pelgo’s people didn’t rely on just the vaporators or a few half-dry mines for income; they hunted and traded animal parts, kept livestock, made things. They were even growing black melons and polta beans; Din saw vines curling up out of the sands, fragile beanstalks wavering in the winds. 

_ If Fett gets his way, Mos Pelgo will change.  _

Din had read over the agreement Fett’d pulled together before climbing aboard Fett’s speeder and hitting the sands. He’d felt that he owed it to the town, at least, to make sure he wasn’t bringing them terms that would grab them by the throat. 

Fett didn’t want much from Mos Pelgo except safe passage between Mos Eisley and Bestine, where Fett could access freighters and smugglers willing to run Mumble’s Turnaround and skirt most of the Hutt-controlled hyperlanes. 

_ I don’t know if Vanth will want that kind of trouble, though.  _

Fett had assured Din that he had no intention of trading in slaves, but moving  _ other  _ illegal goods, mostly weapons and spice, through a place as remote as Mos Pelgo would catch the attention of the cartels. 

_ The terms aren’t bad, even if the trouble would be.  _ Fett was willing to garrison Mos Pelgo and ensure its protection with his own men -- once he had them, though Din doubted he was supposed to mention that while negotiating with Vanth -- and he was willing to feed them too. Jabba’s palace had grown its own food for centuries. Mos Pelgo was off to a good start with its little patches of black melons and polta beans, but not much else would grow out here. 

The little town was humming as Din slowed his approach and started to look for a place to stow the speeder. Everyone seemed to be doing something, hauling silicate or driving banthas or tending to the melon vines, even the kids. Even the Tuskens, who Din was surprised to see; there were three young warriors with rifles in their hands posted up on top of the cantina, watching the desert carefully. 

_ The Sun Rock decided to stick around, then,  _ thought Din, pleased. He had liked the Sun Rock warriors. They’d been more friendly than most other bands, willing to work with Mos Pelgo despite their history, though Din supposed that a greater krayt offered a pretty good reason for even the fiercest enemies to band together. The fact that some of the Sun Rock had stuck around, and were apparently keeping watch for the town, was an encouraging sign. 

If someone like Vanth could grow to see sense and strike a truce with Tuskens -- and keep it, once the threat of getting eaten by an overgrown worm passed -- maybe he’d seen sense and ally with Fett after all. 

_ Fifteen ingots of beskar. A camtono,  _ Din thought.  _ Sixteen if he comes back to speak with Fett directly.  _

_ I can do this.  _ Din had never tried to negotiate anything on behalf of a client before -- the only negotiations Din was good at were the sort that involved a blaster -- but Vanth knew Din, had been friendly enough after the krayt. 

_ I can do this.  _ If Din did well, Fett would give Din more work. More work meant more beskar and more time away from the prickly, hollow mood on the light cruiser. Din shook his head, banishing the thought of the light cruiser, and set his determination. He could do this. 

Several people, most of them covered in vaporator grease or mine dust, saw Din come in. They tensed at first before they recognized his armor and began to wave excitedly. Din lifted a hand back as he stopped the bike outside of the cantina and stepped down, adjusting his cloak so it fell over the darksaber and his spear so it didn’t jab him in the back of the knee. 

Another night’s sleep had done Din good. His leg still hurt but it was clarifying, energizing. Each step sharpened his focus. His wrist and his head barely hurt at all. He’d even managed to keep down a plate of  _ easda,  _ a thick Tusken breakfast made with poonten seeds, and had managed an entire cup of Ushib’s caf without nausea churning in his gut.

Work had always helped Din focus. The bruise on his leg, now solidly blue and purple, pressed into all his musclesss and throbbing lowly with every beat of Din’s heart, helped too, but Din didn’t want to think about that while he was working. 

The memory of Fett’s hands on Din’s body was never far from the surface of his thoughts. 

Fennec had put Din through his paces too; he’d gone to find her after haggling with Fett and, true to Fett’s word, she’d been more than happy to shoot at Din. Her aim was unnervingly good. It had been fun to duck and weave and dart around the training ring, flashing sunlight in her eyes off the polished edges of his beskar, trying to confuse her. 

_ I could get used to it,  _ DIn thought to himself as he approached the cantina. He didn’t know how to feel about that. He  _ could  _ get used to it, staying in the palace, hunting for Fett, sparring, watching the suns come up from the long, narrow window in his room. 

His leg ached. He probably shouldn’t get used to it. 

Din shook the thought off like a bantha scattering flies, reaching the catina and stepping inside. 

It was just as dim and grimy as it had been the first time Din’d crossed the threshold, except this time, Cobb Vanth was leaning against the bar, waiting for him. When he heard Din’s deliberately loud footfall, the old marshal turned around and broke into a wide smile. 

“Mando!” Vanth boomed, pushing himself off the bar to his feet. He looked exactly like he had when Din had seen him last. Vanth was still tall and skinny, all legs, his hair a ridiculous riot of grey and his red bandana tucked firmly around his neck. He’d probably look just like that for another twenty years. Din smiled. “Haven’t seen you in a turn or two! We thought you’d hit the black and stay gone. How’re ya?” Vanth crossed the distance between them and shook Din’s hand with the same sturdy, cheerful energy he’d had parlaying with Tuskens and shooting at a krayt dragon. 

“Fine,” Din said. “You? Town’s still standing.” 

“Yeah, we’re doin’ pretty good,” said Vanth. “No more krayts, at least, and those new friends we made’re real good at scarin’ off the worst of the  _ kung  _ in these parts.” 

He looked at Din’s boots, checked the hip not hidden by the folds of Din’s cloak, then frowned. The expression creased his entire face. “Where’s the kid? You didn’t lose him, did you?”

Din tried not to wince, remembering the terror in his throat as the darktroopers had risen into the sky on Tython, Grogu disappearing with them. “He’s with -- He’s fine. I found his people,” Din said. “Jedi. He’s gone with them for training.”

“Oh.” Vanth relaxed. The kid’d had that effect on people. Everywhere Din had gone the kid had stolen hearts, even from the oddest places. Worn-out mercs like Cara, gruff mechanics like Pelli, stringy ex-slaves like Vanth, Jedi in hiding, even a career criminal like Greef Karga. Everyone had loved the kid. Even Doctor Pershing had been protective of him, though Doctor Pershing had been too much a coward to stop Gideon from using Grogu’s blood. 

“Didn’t know there were any of those left anymore,” Vanth continued. “They as cool as they were in the stories?”

“I didn’t ever hear any stories about Jedi,” Din admitted. He hadn’t even heard the word until the armorer had mentioned it down in the forge. “The two I’ve met have been… capable.” The one who’d come for Grogu had cut through twenty darktroopers in the time it had taken Din to bring down one, and the Jedi hadn’t gotten his head kicked in like Din. And Ahsoka Tano would have been able to take on Morgan Elspeth on her own -- Din had just helped clear the way a little. 

Vanth sighed, sounding wistful. “I always wanted to be a Jedi,” he said. He gestured Din in the direction of the bar, where a battered table and a cluster of stools waited off to the side with a view of the door. “When I was younger and wilder there was a story goin’ around about a kid in the Quarters who got free and went off to train with the Jedi. Years and years ago. We thought it was all smoke until we started seeing him on the Holonet. He went on to become some big hero in the Clone Wars. When he died half the planet was drunk for a week.” 

“I heard the same thing happened when Jabba died.” 

Vanth snorted. “That was different. That was a party, at least up until the Empire went down right after him and the whole planet started chewing itself to pieces. When Skywalker died, we all drank like someone’d come and shot our mothers.” 

Din startled. “Skywalker?” 

Vanth blinked. “Yeah, Anakin Skywalker. You’ve never heard of him? Big general in the Clone Wars. The Hero With No Fear, they called him. He died on the steps of the Jedi Temple on Coruscant, folk said, trying to protect the younglings.” 

Din took a breath. “The Jedi who has Grogu -- the kid -- his name is Luke Skywalker.”

Vanth thought for a moment, clearly trying to place the name, then gave it up and shrugged. “Don’t know him. Could be related, maybe? There’s a lot of Skywalkers -- ‘s not an uncommon name around these parts, or anywhere along the sorrowlanes.”

_ A slave name.  _ The sorrowlanes were the routes across Hutt space where slaves were moved. Din avoided them when he could. Din was a skilled fighter, but slaving gangs were tenacious and there was a high price on Mandalorians. 

“I’d never heard of Jedi,” Din said. “Not until I found the kid and started looking for his kind. You have?” 

Vanth nodded and ushered Din over to his table, raising a finger for some spotchka. Din nodded when the bartender cocked an eyebrow in his direction -- he’d take a glass, even if he didn’t manage to work up the nerve to take his helmet off in front of Vanth. 

“They were never  _ common,  _ not really,” Vanth said. “‘Specially not out here in rimspace. But we all heard the stories growing up, and every now and then a Jedi would come to bargain with Jabba about somethin’ or other. Skywalker was a podracer. I knew some other kids that ran around on his side of the Quarter. There was a big dust-up over him winnin’ the Boonta Eve, oh, forty years ago? He was about my age, but I was too tall and too stupid to put out in a pod.” 

Din listened, head cocked. The bartender brought over two bottles of bright blue spotchka. 

_ A human podracer?  _ Din himself was a decent pilot, but he couldn’t imaging racing pods. He’d seen a few -- twenty odd racers started every time, but no more than twelve or thirteen ever made it to the finish.

“Anyway,” Vanth continued, “word went around the Quarter that not only had Skywalker won his freedom, he’d had Jedi powers all along and was goin’ off with two Knights to learn how to be one. The next time any of us heard his name the Clone Wars were on and Skywalker was a General, a full Jedi Knight, runnin’ around a hundred different battles and outflyin’ the Seppies.”

“But what  _ happened  _ to the Jedi?” Din asked, leaning forward. “Where’d they all go?”

Vanth tipped his head back and forth, laughing a little. “You really don’t know? Where’d you come from, under a rock?” 

“I was young during the Clone Wars,” said Din, defensively. He didn’t remember much about the world he’d come from, but it had been Outer Rim enough to fall to the Separatists without much fuss -- none of the Republic forces had ever shown up to help. 

Vanth’s friendly face softened a little at that. Despite his shock of grey hair, Din didn’t think Vanth could be  _ that  _ old -- he was plenty spry and crackling with energy. If Din had to guess he’d put Vanth at maybe fifty standard. But that was older than Din, who only remembered the Clone Wars as one specific, drawn-out nightmare. Vanth must’ve seen it from start to finish, even from the dust of Tatooine.

“The story in the Core’s that the Jedi betrayed the Republic,” Vanth said, taking a pull of spotchka from his bottle. “They were the generals of the Clone Army, the ones runnin’ the whole mess. Decimated themselves against the Seps, I guess. Story is that the few Jedi left by the end of the war saw that the war  _ was  _ nearly over and decided that they liked the power they’d had, so instead of givin’ it all up and goin’ back to being monks, they tried to overthrow the Senate.” 

Din snorted. The Senate -- Republic and Galactic -- had been a joke. 

Vanth lifted his bottle wryly. “Exactly,” he said. He shrugged. “I dunno, I wasn’t there, but any time a Coreworlder says somethin’ it’s usually womp-tail backwards. The clones killed all the Jedi anyway, down to the kids. Maybe the generals  _ were  _ plannin’ something, but the kids? The GAR lit the whole temple on Coruscant up, it was all over the Holonet. I dunno how they got all the generals in the field -- luck, maybe, or maybe it took the Empire longer to track down the full Knights than they let on -- but that was the end of it there on Coruscant. Can’t train more Jedi if there aren’t any kids left to train.” 

Din curled his hand into a fist involuntarily.  _ Children.  _ He’d never thought about it, not really, that Luke Skywalker and Ahsoka Tano had been Jedi kids once, like Grogu. 

“The Empire doesn’t care about children,” said Din, darkly. Moff Gideon had been more than happy to hurt the kid, to  _ use  _ him. And on the rare occasion that the Empire had managed to find one of the coverts they hadn’t spared the foundlings. They’d razed everything to the ground, elders, warriors and children all together. 

“No,” said Vanth. “They didn’t. Not that the Republic was any better. All the kids the Hutts sold around didn’t bother the Republic at all, did they?”

Din inclined his head, conceding the point. The Core had never given a thought to the Outer Rim, unless the thought was  _ How can we take more from them?  _

“Way I figure it, the Jedi wanted out,” said Vanth. “ _ We  _ were told that Jedi were peacekeepers, when we were kids. Diplomats. Weird monks. They had odd powers and odd ways of doin’ things, but they were mostly harmless. They didn’t wanna fight anymore, didn’t wanna go along when the Republic changed its name, so the clones killed ‘em all. Made ‘em into a common enemy, pointed the whole galaxy at ‘em and let loose.”

_ Like us banding together to fight the krayt,  _ Din thought. His stomach twisted. He knew the power of a common enemy. A common enemy had landed him with Bo-Katan, too -- they had all pulled together to fight Gideon. 

“How’d the Jedi end up generals in a war, then, if they were peacekeepers?” Din asked, frowning. The  _ alor  _ had called Jedi Mandalore’s natural enemies. Din was learning that Mandalorians could very easily make an enemy out of anything that moved, including each other, but what glory was there in fighting a group of peacekeepers? 

Din thought of the ease with which Skywalker had destroyed the darktroopers and shook his head. Maybe the Jedi had been peacekeepers once, but that had been a long time ago. 

“Well, that I don’t know,” Vanth admitted. He scratched the back of his head. “Karkin’ bad luck, maybe? Whatever the real story is, the Empire wiped ‘em out. Worst thing they could’ve done for relations with Tatooine was kill Skywalker -- the masters didn’t give a womp, but half the planet clawed itself free to go fight for the Partisans or the Rebellion and those of us who couldn’t shake the chains made occupation a fun time for the Imps.” 

Din smiled underneath his helmet. The Tuskens hadn’t liked the Imperials either. Stormtrooper hunting had been an honored sport among the White Bantha. 

“But,” said Vanth, brightening again, “‘s good to hear that not all the Jedi are gone. Who knows, maybe your kid’ll be the one to bring ‘em back.” 

“Maybe,” Din allowed. A pang went through him. By the time Grogu would be old enough to do much of anything, Din would be rust and dust. “I don’t think that the Jedi -- the ones who are left, anyway -- are interested much in coming back.” 

He didn’t know where Skywalker had taken the kid. Somewhere safe, Din hoped. Somewhere that no one like Moff Gideon would ever think to look, so the kid could grow up happy and looked after and safe while he learned to use his powers. 

“Can’t say I blame ‘em,” Vanth observed. He took another drink of spotchka and eyed Din. Underneath his friendly exterior Vanth had a mind like a vornskr, sharp and watchful. Most slaves who made it to freedom had the same suspicion, the same watchfulness, much like most Mandalorians who made it through their training. “So what brings you here, Mando? Didn’t expect to see you again, to be honest. Not that it’s not good to see you, mind. You still lookin’ for other Mandalorians? Ain’t seen any in these parts, not even bountymen like you.”

Din drummed his fingers on the table, restless. “I found a few others,” he said, watching Vanth. “Warriors, including Boba Fett.” 

Cobb Vanth went very still. 

So did the bartender, who’d made an aborted little twitch towards the underside of the bar. 

_ Reaching for a blaster.  _

Vanth had one on his hip. He wasn’t wearing any armor at all, not really, aside from his thick red sweater and the bandana that Din knew Vanth wore to cover up his scars. But the bartender had a blaster under the bar and Din had been seen coming in.

His instincts twitched. Somewhere outside the cantina, someone -- one of the raiders, if Din had to guess -- had a blaster leveled at the back of Din’s head. 

Din, very purposefully, laid both of his hands flat on the table. He was a fast draw and Vanth knew it too, but Din hoped that Vanth knew that Din had no intention of hurting him. 

“Thought it might come to this,” said Vanth, heavily. He drained his spotchka. “Don’t suppose it matters that I didn’t know that it was his armor at the time, does it?” 

Din blinked, thrown. “What?”

“We’d hoped that the bastard was dead,” Vanth continued, then seemed to realize what he’d said and winced. “Who survives gettin’ eaten by a sarlacc, anyway?”

“Fett got eaten by a  _ sarlacc? _ ” Din spluttered, startled. It was Vanth’s turn to stare. 

“Yeah, years ago,” said Vanth, slowly. “It was the talk of the desert for a while. Same day Jabba died.” 

“A  _ sarlacc, _ ” Din repeated, disbelieving. He’d never seen one, having had at least the sense to avoid the places in the Great Dune Sea where the pits lurked underneath the sands, but he’d heard about them. Jabba the Hutt had liked to throw his most troublesome enemies into the Pit of Carkoon while his entire court watched and cheered from the side of a barge. No one survived a sarlacc -- their stomachs were nothing but slow, churning acid, their throats ringed with teeth to prevent anyone from crawling out. 

“That’s the story, anyway, and I’ll believe that before I believe any of the kark from the Core about the Jedi,” Vanth said. He was frowning, brow furrowed. He cast a nervous look at the still-frozen bartender. “You’re not… here to kill me, then?” 

“I’m not an assassin,” said Din sharply, thoughts whirling. What had happened for Fett to end up in a  _ sarlacc pit?  _ Had he angered Jabba? Misstepped somehow? The web of scars all over Fett’s body made more sense, now. Din had thought that Fett’d been too close to an explosion or a flamethrower, but acid burned just as well as fire. 

“You’re not here to bring me in, then? I’m told my bounty’s prodigious, these days.” 

“No, Fett doesn’t --  _ I  _ wouldn’t take a puck on you.” Din shook his head to clear it. He was thrown, but he was used to being thrown these days, and forced himself to recover and get on with it. 

The gangs and slaving outfits around Tatooine might want Vanth dead, but Din wouldn’t take a contract out on an ally. Din made a mental note to drop by Nevarro once he’d secured himself a ship and firmly suggest that the Guild refuse any contracts on Vanth too.

Vanth relaxed a fraction, which heartened Din.  _ He still trusts me, then. At least a little.  _ “What’s Fett want, then?” 

“An alliance,” said Din. 

Vanth snorted. 

“No, really,” Din pressed. He kept tripping over his own thoughts.  _ A karking sarlacc.  _ No wonder Fett had wanted to steal Jabba’s empire from the Hutts -- if Din’s employers had ever fed him to a sarlacc, he would’ve wanted to destroy them too. Not that Din was sure he’d survive getting thrown to one. Din’s own will to live was strong, as was any Mandalorian’s, but crawling out of a sarlacc was like crawling out of a black hole, impossible to imagine. 

_ Focus, Mandalorian.  _ Din was on a job. He would do well, and not just for the beskar waiting for him if he finished the job. The bruise on his leg throbbed. 

He took a breath and very slowly reached for the datapad Fett had given him, making sure Vanth could see that Din’s hands were nowhere near his blaster. He didn’t want to get shot in the head, even if his beskar would hold up to it. The resonance would make Din sick for hours. 

“Here,” said Din. “This is for you.” 

He slid the datapad across the space between himself and Vanth. 

Vanth took it and blinked. “This is from Fett?” 

Din nodded. “He put it together this morning.”

Vanth blinked again, scrolling slowly. He read very carefully, Din noticed, as if the lines of Aurebesh weren’t entirely familiar to him. 

Din waited patiently, neck prickling. The bartender had relaxed some, his hands drifting away from the hidden blaster, but whoever had Din in their crosshairs outside hadn’t yet dropped their guard. 

Finally, Vanth looked back up. “He wants to run goods through us,” he said. 

Din nodded. 

“ _ Us, _ ” Vanth repeated, sweeping a hand out to encompass Mos Pelgo; its cluster of homes, its creaking vaporators, the half-dry mines underneath it all. 

Din shrugged. “Fett wants to do things differently than Jabba did,” he said. 

Vanth’s eyes sharpened. “How differently?”

“He doesn't freight with slavers, if that’s what you’re asking,” Din said. 

“Didn’t seem to care much when the worm was in charge,” Vanth returned, flatly. “Fett’d take a bounty on anyone, free or not. Lost a lot of friends in the network to him.” 

Din shrugged again. “Maybe he grew a conscience sitting in the sarlacc’s belly,” Din said. He didn’t want to explain a  _ beroya’ _ s code to Vanth, didn’t know if he even had the right words. To a  _ beroya,  _ a job was a job. Individual hunters could refuse whatever jobs they liked -- DIn had never hunted down escaped slaves, no matter how good the pay had been -- but once a job was taken or a contract struck, a hunter honored his word. If Fett had joined Jabba to hunt errant smugglers and signed a long-term contract, he would have had to hunt whoever Jabba told him to hunt. 

_ Maybe he didn’t care, either,  _ Din thought, but that didn’t quite align with the Fett he was getting to know, the Fett who offered help thoughtlessly, firmly. The Fett who had let Din drool all over his chest, who had run his hands through Din’s hair. 

Vanth snorted. “And maybe bladebacks can fly,” he retorted. 

Din spread his hands. “You’ve got his terms,” said Din. “All I can do is bring them to you, and vouch for Fett’s intentions. He wants a partnership. He doesn’t want to take you over or run you out; he doesn’t want to be the Mining Collective.” 

Vanth studied Din with those watchful vornskr eyes. Finally he said, “You’ll vouch for him?”

Din nodded. He wasn’t good with words, but he could do this. 

“Why?” Vanth asked. 

“He kept his word when I needed him to,” Din said. After Fett had gotten his armor back on Tython, he could have gone anywhere. He could have left Din stranded on that planet,  _ Razor Crest  _ in ruins, kid gone, left with nothing but his armor and his spear. 

But Fett hadn’t. He’d honored his word and had taken Din to Morak, to Kryze, to Gideon. He’d stuck around while Din had been unconscious in a bacta tank. 

_ He helped me.  _ Din resisted the urge to dig his fingers into his leg and remember the pressure, the weight. 

Vanth looked at Din for a while, then shook his head. Din’s heart sank. 

“I dunno, Mando,” Vanth said. “This is -- we’re no strangers to skirtin’ the law here, such as it were, but this is heavy stuff. I’m gonna guess that Fett’s eyein’ us because Hutt space is closed to him?” 

“He’s trying to get access to Mumble’s Turnaround, yeah,” Din admitted. “Through Bestine.” 

“Not a bad play,” said Vanth. “I dunno. The money’d be good -- better than good, have you read this? -- but the threat… we’re not exactly sitting rontos out here, but we don’t have a nice palace to hide in, either.”

“Fett will protect you.” 

“He  _ says  _ he’ll protect us,” said Vanth, tapping the datapad. 

“He’s good for his word,” Din insisted.

Vanth held up a hand. “Easy, Mando, I believe you,” he said, cracking a smile at last. “I believe that you believe Fett, anyway, and after what you did for us half this town’d probably follow you off a cliff, me included.  _ But _ ,” he stressed, “we don’t run things like Fett does in his palace out here. I can bring his offer before the town and we can all vote on it, but that’s about all I can do for you.” 

Din relaxed. “That’s all I need,” he said. 

Vanth’s eyes turned up at the corners. “Don’t get your hopes up,” he warned. “We’re cautious folk, us.” 

Din thought about the whole town facing the greater krayt, shoulder to shoulder with Tuskens they hated, and snorted. “Like Mandalorians are cautious, maybe.” 

“I’m gonna assume that’s a compliment,” said Vanth, cheerfulness returning. “C’mon, then, let’s go see if there’s enough folks around for a quorum. If you’re lucky we’ll have an answer by dinnertime, and then you can lose to me at sabacc.”

“I never lose at sabacc,” said Din, who had been counting cards since he was knee high to a womp rat. Din didn’t like gambling, but if he won every time it hardly counted as gambling. 

“First time for everything, Mando,” said Vanth, half-rising, when a skinny, sand-blasted human wrapped in white burst through the cantina door, calling for the Marshal. 

“Woah, Kesh, easy now,” said Vanth. Din blinked -- this was the person who’d spotted him in the sands and had waved him over, saving him from a long and obnoxious night alone in the desert. 

She was human and fairly young, still lanky like a teenager who hadn’t quite finished growing. She had freckles and wild hair and a puckered scar on her cheek. Enormous goggles hid her eyes. 

“Sorry, Marshal,” the girl, Kesh, panted. 

“Sand and stars, girl, you run here from the rocks?” Vanth asked, reaching out to steady her. Din watched with interest. The prickling on the back of his neck had finally faded -- the sniper on the rooftops had decided that Din was no threat to Cobb Vanth. Din was pleased that someone was taking such care with Vanth’s life. 

“I did,” said Kesh. She spotted Din’s untouched bottle and looked up at him, her googles black and unreadable. Wordlessly, Din nodded. She grinned and snatched it up, downing half before Vanth plucked it from her fingers and glared at Din. 

“You’ve got six months before you’re old enough for Maren’s brew,” Vanth scolded, tucking the spotchka firmly under his arm. “Mister Mandalorian here’s a bad influence. Now, girl, what’s got you all up in arms?”

“Sandstorm’s comin’, Marshal!” Kesh chirped. Din stiffened. Vanth sighed. 

“You sure?” 

Kesh nodded. “Comin’ in from the east,” she said. “A’Ten and Douwan are already sounding the alarms. It’ll be on us within the hour.” 

Vanth signed again, enormously. He shot an apologetic look at Din. “Sorry, Mando,” he said. “Quorum’ll have to wait.”

“I understand,” Din said. Sandstorms were too dangerous to ignore. He paused, a headache beginning to prickle behind his left ear, and said, “Do you have somewhere I can wait it out?”

“Yeah,” said Vanth, dryly. “My basement.” 

That was how, an hour later, Din found himself packed into Cobb Vanth’s storm bunker with the entire town of Mos Pelgo. 

He’d been to Vanth’s before. After the krayt Din had fallen asleep in Vanth’s sonic while Grogu had thrown food all over Vanth’s walls. They’d slept in Vanth’s bed while Vanth himself had gone from house to house in Mos Pelgo, spreading the news that the krayt dragon was dead. 

The storm bunker was big and sturdy. Because Vanth was the town’s marshal, he had durasteel reinforcing the sandstone walls, and when the storms came Vanth packed everybody in underneath his house to wait it out. 

“Used to be part of the mines,” Vanth had explained, as he had enlisted Din’s help moving the town underground. “When we ran the Collective off, the miners sealed it up for me. It’s not the worst place to wait out a howler.” 

It really wasn’t, even though Din had a Bith child pressed up against one side and a Twi’Lek crammed against the other. He didn’t mind the crowd; a bit of claustrophobia was better than being stripped to the bone out in the sands. Tatooine’s howlers were so violent that not even the beskar would protect Din -- the armor would hold but his kute would be stripped off, and there was hardly any air to breathe in a sandstorm. Din’s helmet had a small rebreather, but it had a short lifespan.

The sandstorm started not long after Vanth ushered a person who had to be the oldest human woman Din had ever seen into his bunker and sealed the hatch behind her. Even though they were twenty feet or more underground, the whole town heard the winds begin to shriek. 

All of the children were delighted to see Din again. Most of the adults were too, calling his name and slapping his back, jostling to be closer. As the winds began to pick up, Vanth held his hands up, calling for quiet. 

“Alright, you womp-rats, settle down,” Vanth said, stepping over sprawled legs. “As you may’ve noticed, we’ve got a guest with us for this storm, so I want you to be hospitable, yeah? Mister Mando here is a hero in these parts, so we oughta give him a hero’s welcome.” 

Din groaned, but the sound was lost among the laughter that rippled from Mos Pelgo’s inhabitants. 

“Spell it out for us, Marshal,” Kesh called. “Does that mean we tell him the good stories, or the  _ really  _ good stories?”

Din cocked his head. “Stories?” he asked, loud enough to be heard over the crowd. 

Almost every eye in the bunker turned to him. Grins broke out across several faces, including Vanth’s. 

“Yeah,” said Vanth, nudging Kesh with a boot. “‘S tradition, when there’s a sandstorm. We tell stories. You ever hear a good old-fashioned Tatooine folktale?” 

Din shook his head, curious now. He’d heard just about the entire history of the Tuskens, but that was only because Tusken storysingers told the whole thing at once. He hadn’t heard any stories from the humans of Tatooine. 

Vanth’s grin broadened, like he knew something that Din didn’t. 

“You heard him, folks,” Vanth said, finally finding a spot to slot himself against the wall. “Go on, then. Kesh, wanna start?” 

So Din sat and listened to stories while the sandstorm raged outside. Some were parables, childrens’ stories --  _ How Kirik-Fly Got Her Wings, Bantha-Mother Finds Water, The Women in the Suns.  _ Others were skewed for an older audience --  _ The Bladeback Boar’s Many Wives  _ made Din blush underneath his helmet, skin tingling were it pressed against the edges of his beskar plates. 

“You have any good stories for us, Mando?” Kesh asked, after she’d finished an extremely bawdy tale she called  _ Anooba Steals the Moons.  _ “What do Mandalorians talk about around the cookfire?” 

Din shifted, uncomfortable with the sudden interest pricking up from all sides. “Our battles, mostly,” he said. He didn’t know any stories about animals or magic or anything like that -- Mandalorians didn’t make up stories to explain how the suns moved across the sky or sing about Clever Anooba tricking Bantha-Mother out of her moons so the pack could hunt at night. 

_ Or if we do, I don’t know any songs or stories.  _ It occurred to Din, pressed in together with all of Mos Espa, that maybe some Mandalorians  _ did  _ have stories like that. Din dimly remembered hearing about an old Mandalorian King taming and riding a mythosaur, but he didn’t remember any of the details. There was something prickling in his mind about the stars, too, but Din couldn’t remember why stars were significant, aside from serving as waypoints.

_ Maybe Kryze knows.  _ Din winced at the thought of asking her.  _ Or maybe Fett has some. Maybe his father learned, as a foundling.  _

“Battles?” a little Bith crowded even closer, staring up at Din with open fascination. “Cooler than fighting the dragon?”

Din couldn’t help but smile. “No,” he said, “not quite like that, but I have a -- brother -- who wrestled a rancor, once.” 

“Tell us!” a Twi’Lek boy demanded. All of the adults were smiling and nodding, the children crowding in to hear a new story. 

Din looked at Vanth, a little helplessly. 

Vanth grinned and waved a hand.  _ Go on,  _ his eyes said.  _ Tell them. _

So Din haltingly did as he was asked. He skirted any stories of his own exploits -- Din was too old to boast about bounties brought down or rivals outsmarted like a newly-armored warrior -- but he shared a few stories he’d heard in his younger days. 

He kept names to himself, but shared Paz’s exploits on Canto Bight -- he had been trampled by a falthier while Din had laughed himself sick -- and the time Annika had accidentally married a prince on Shu-Torun. He talked about the time he’d been on Kashyyyk climbing wroshyr trees and had been nearly eaten by a bird the size of a spaceship and about the Foundlings’ Trial, where all the children of the tribe had been dropped off in the wilderness and had to find their way back to the covert. Din had taken the Trial twice, mostly to spite Paz, and had charted his way through the luminous jungles of Felucia and the rusting minefields of Bracca. 

Everyone, even the adults, listened with rapt fascination. Din didn’t know what to do with all their attention but it was easier to talk to the kids, so he kept his focus on them and answered all their questions. 

_ I guess if you’ve never left Tatooine, even somewhere like Bracca is exciting.  _

“Where  _ haven’t  _ you been?” one of the kids, a green Rodian with enormous star-flecked eyes, asked in awe. 

Din shrugged. “Coruscant?” 

For some reason that made all of the kids giggle hysterically and they took turns quizzing Din on Core Worlds he’d visited -- exactly two, Abregado-rae and Bar’leth, both on jobs that Din felt vaguely children shouldn’t hear about -- getting louder and louder while the sandstorm howled outside. 

“Mister Mandalorian,” one child finally asked, her voice rising over her friends’ as Din told them all, in the vaguest terms possible, about hunting a spice dealer through the Museum of Bar’leth while trying to desperately dodge museum security droids, “will you come and be our new marshal?”

Din looked at Vanth again, baffled, as all the adults roared with laughter. 

“Hey,” said Vanth, laughing himself. He dropped his voice into a mock whisper, which made the kids laugh even harder. “Job’s yours if you want it. Gotta warn you, though, the pay’s pretty terrible, and some of the locals are  _ really  _ weird.” 

That set off a round of protests and laughter as Mos Pelgo’s people lobbed gentle insults at one another, each trying to dodge the title of “Mos Pelgo’s Strangest Resident.” The joking pulled the attention away from Din, though, which let him relax. He didn’t mind it, the press of bodies, the warmth, the noise. It wasn’t being down in the covert sharing  _ tiingilar  _ around a circle while the older warriors told of the jobs they’d took or the fights they’d won, the places they’d seen, and the foundlings tussled like loth-wolf cubs, but it wasn’t that much different, either. 

_ It’s nice,  _ Din thought to himself, settling down to watch as a battle-scarred old miner called a laughing Vanth something indelicate.  _ It’s… comfortable.  _

That was when Din felt a faint pressure on one of his gauntlets. He looked down and found the Bith curiously tugging at the gauntlet’s edge, his face reflected in the beskar. 

“Tobes,” one of the adults -- not a Bith, Din noticed -- started, but Din held up his other hand. 

“It’s alright,” he said. “Here, hold on.” He released the seal and let Tobes pull Din’s gauntlet off. Din shook his wrist out and smiled down at the Bith, even though Tobes couldn’t see it. Tobes didn’t even seem to care. He held the gauntlet up, eyes enormous. 

“Wow!” he said. 

“Let me see it for a second,” Din said, realizing that the gauntlet was still active and that the wrong button would put a hole in Vanth’s house or shoot a jet of fire over the heads of the village. 

Tobes handed the gauntlet back reluctantly. Din fiddled with it for a moment, making sure it was deactivated, then handed it back. 

“Wizard!” 

“I wanna see!” one of the girls declared, shoving her way closer, and that was how Din found himself picked over like a bantha carcass. By the time the sandstorm quieted, Din had only managed to keep hold of his cuirass, which was too heavy for most of the kids to pry off, and his helmet. The rest of his armor had slowly made its way through the group, passed from child to child with much excited discussion.

Din tried not to keep track of every piece. It wasn’t like Mos Pelgo’s kids were going to run off with any of it -- the sandstorm, while mostly quiet, still licked at the walls outside, and none of the kids here were scrumrats or scavengers. They all had parents or at least adults minding them, all had homes, however small, to go back to once the storm broke. None of them would try to sell a piece of Din’s armor on the black market -- Mos Pelgo was so small and insular that there probably  _ wasn’t _ a black market. 

He couldn’t stop himself from tracking some of it, though, even as a few kids gathered even closer and started prodding curiously at the dense circuitry running through his kute. 

“Mister Mandalorian, what’s this mean?” a gap-toothed human boy called, holding up the paulron with Din’s sigil stamped across it. 

“It’s a mudhorn,” said Din. 

“What’s that?”

“It’s an animal,” Din explained. “From a different planet. Arvala-Seven. Mudhorns live there in caves.” 

“Are they big?” the boy’s eyes were wide.

“Yes.”

“How big?” 

_ Big enough to break two ribs, but small enough to get levitated by a magic toddler.  _ “A little smaller than a bantha, maybe,” Din said. “But meaner. They have long horns on their faces and a temper.” 

_ Not having a Mandalorian shooting fire in your face would put you in a good mood.  _

“Why d’you have one on your armor?” another kid asked. She was a Twi’Lek with bright orange lekku. She had one of Din’s leg plates and was turning it over, looking for other sigils. “Mister Marshal didn’t have anything cool on his armor, ‘cept for the dent in his head.” 

“Helmet,” Vanth corrected, touching his forehead gingerly. He darted a nervous look at Din. “That dent was there when I found it,” he added. 

Din smiled. “Everyone always goes for the helmet,” he said. He knocked his fist lightly against his own, the resonance soft. “We don’t mind much. We’re pretty sturdy.” 

Vanth cracked a smile at that. 

“Mister Mandalorian,” the girl said imperiously, determined to have her question answered. Din turned his attention back to her. 

“The mudhorn is my sigil,” he explained. All the kids gave him blank looks. “My… my sign. I earned it. My  _ alor  _ \-- the leader of my tribe -- gave it to me, so other warriors would know me. It tells other Mandalorians that I’m a good warrior. A good hunter.” 

“ _ Cool, _ ” the boy holding Din’s pauldron breathed, tracing the mudhorn’s dramatic features with his fingers. 

“Mister Marshal,” said the Twi’Lek, who now looked  _ incredibly  _ unimpressed with Vanth, “why didn’t  _ you  _ have a sig-ill?”

“Sigil,” Vanth said, patiently. He shrugged. “I’m not a Mandalorian, Koyi. And I was only borrowing the armor -- any mark on it belongs to its real owner.” 

“Who’s that?”

The adults in the room, mostly content up until now to watch the kids affectionately and laugh at Din as they climbed all over him, went very still. Din couldn’t help but feel a bit defensive of Fett on Fett’s behalf -- Fett wasn’t that bad. Anybody who fussed over a little bruise as much as Fett had couldn’t be that fearsome. 

_ I don’t know what he was like when he worked for Jabba,  _ Din reminded himself.  _ He survived in the desert with the Tuskens -- that means he’s hard, even if he’s been kind to me.  _

“That would be Boba Fett,” said Vanth, calmly. He looked at Din. “The King of Tatooine.” 

“I don’t know if he’s going with that title,” Din muttered. Fett didn’t have much of Tatooine under his thumb, not really -- Mos Eisley and a few moisture farms, a few spice lanes. He’d have more if Vanth agreed to Fett’s terms, but a few dusty towns and vaporators didn’t make a kingdom. 

Vanth snorted. “What’s he going with, then, Fett the Hutt?”

Din chuckled. “No, I don’t think he’ll go with that either. I don’t think he’s trying to draw the attention of the Hutts any more than he already has, and he’s Mandalorian. Names are important. He’ll -- he’ll keep his own name.” 

_ His father’s name.  _ Din ignored the very old, mostly-healed over pang of jealousy that fluttered through his ribs. Din had never been given a Mandalorian clan name. He didn’t  _ need  _ one, of course, but still. It had rankled, as a kid, to watch Paz go with the Vizslas and the Skiratas choose Annika. 

Din understood it now -- he hadn’t had much to offer as a kid. He’d been small and untrained and scared of everything. Din thought sometimes that the Mandalorian who’d rescued him -- the one who had carried him up out of the smoke and blaster fire -- would have adopted Din if he had lived, but he’d died not long after he’d dropped Din off with the Corps. By the time Din  _ had  _ been strong enough to win some fights and prove his worth to a clan, there hadn’t been any clans left with the resources to take in a foundling. Din and the rest of his age group had been raised by the tribe, and names had ceased to be that important, anyway.

_ The Empire is looking for Vizslas,  _ the older warriors had said.  _ Looking for Skiratas, for Raus, for Ordos. Better to just be a Mandalorian of the tribe. Better to be no one, better to be safe.  _

Vanth just grunted. 

“Didn’t your armor have little skulls on it?” Kesh piped up, looking at Vanth, who cocked his head. 

“Oh, yeah! Little skulls, maybe this big.” He held his finger and his thumb apart to show Din. Din blinked, thinking. 

“The mythosaurs?” 

Vanth shrugged. “If that’s what they are, sure. Little skulls with big tusks. Kinda intimidating, though I am starting to gather that you Mandalorian types just like to be intimidating out of hand.” 

Din rolled his eyes. “Mythosaurs aren’t a clan symbol, as far as I know,” Din said, which wasn’t saying much. He thought of Bo-Katan and her  _ tal’vode,  _ with their blue and white armor, the owl sigils on their pauldrons, the eyes on Kryze’s helmet. “For my tribe, anyway. We used it to identify each other.”

“Is Boba Fett your tribe?” Kesh asked. 

Din shook his head. “No. We didn’t meet until recently. After the krayt. He followed me to -- to a different planet. I think he was waiting for his armor to leave Tatooine.” 

Vanth shuddered. “He could’ve come here and took it. I had it for years.” 

Din looked at him. “Fett knew,” he said. “But you were using it.”

“I have a hard time believing that he was alright with that,” Vanth muttered, and Din was struck again by the urge to ask him what he thought Fett was like. Din held off, though, not wanting to upset the kids, who were still passing around pieces of his armor and whispering to each other, excited. 

“Armor is important,” said Din. “What you were doing with it wasn’t dishonorable. You were looking after your people. That’s to be respected, even if the armor wasn’t yours.” 

Vanth snorted, but before he could argue, a wizened old man stood up, gently scattering children, and said, “Storm’s over. Best go see what the damage is, eh?” 

Din didn’t resist as the people around him started to move, shifting and streaming toward Cobb’s door. Din’s armor returned to him in pieces. He tried not to count, but couldn't help himself; his leg armor came back, his pauldrons, his gauntlets. 

He slotted each piece back into place while the rest of Mos Pelgo started to stir. Parents gathered their children, neighbors clapped each other on the shoulder, limbs were stretched and popped. 

“We’ll take a look at the damage,” said Vanth, rising and stretching himself. “Then I’ll call a quorum, yeah?”

Din didn’t argue. The whole town moved and filtered up through Vanth’s front door. Din followed. 

The desert was always very quiet and very still after a sandstorm. Mos Pelgo had been half-buried. He white houses were red with sand. Din’s speeder had toppled over. A few stands of poonten grass had been uprooted, beanstalks pulled up at the roots, but the damage wasn’t too bad. 

“What can I do, while you have your quorum?” Din asked, turning to Vanth, who was surveying the damage with his hands on his hips. 

“You don’t have to do any work, Mando,” said Vanth, lips quirking. 

Din shrugged. “Better than sitting around,” he said. 

“Fair. A’Ten and the others went back to their village for the storm. They’ll be back eventually, but would you mind keepin’ watch, ‘til they get back? We’ll get’cha a pulse rifle, unless that spear you’ve got has a blaster in it.”

Din shook his head. “It’s just a spear.” 

Vanth clapped Din on the back and disappeared back into his house, emerging again a few minutes later with a battered rifle, which he passed off in exchange for Fett’s datapad. Din accepted and chose a vantage point -- the tallest building in Mos Pelgo was the cantina, so Din climbed up on the roof and settled into a resting stance, watching the desert. 

It was quiet, up there. The sandstorm had taken off most of the afternoon and the suns were setting, Mos Pelgo humming back to life as its people started the work of digging out their houses and their gardens, knocking the sand out of their vaporators, checking on their animals. 

Sitting for a few hours had made Din’s sore leg tight and stiff. He flexed his toes and rotated his heel a few times, relishing the pleasant burn. The moons rose and Din thought about the stories he’d listened to. 

The townspeople filtered back into Vanth’s house, leaving their children behind. Din waited. 

Finally, as the night chill of the desert had started to creep into his beskar, Vanth stepped out of his house and whistled up at Din. 

Din blinked, stretched and hopped down off the roof. The impact jarred him some but he kept his feet. He padded over to Vanth, who’s expressive face was, for once, impassable.

Din didn’t push. Vanth would tell him regardless of whether the news was good or bad; rushing it wouldn’t help anyone. He waited some more. 

“Alright,” said Vanth. His eyes flashed in the low light. “We accept.” 

  
  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Not too much action in this one, but some plot stuff! 
> 
> -A bitch is finally reading _Aftermath!_ I am learning many things.  
> -Cobb Vanth is a character created for me specifically, down to the choice of Timothy Olyphant. When we heard that he was going to be in Mando S2 I had hoped for Space Raylan, and Filoni did not disappoint. (Doesn't make up for the existence of the purgill, but it's a start.)  
> -I am trying to skirt some of the common Tatooine slave culture ideas that have become ubiquitous in SW fics, not because I don't like them but because I don't want to co-opt anybody's ideas!  
> -Vanth's account of Anakin Skywalker's death comes from Matthew Stover's _Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor_ ; most people in the galaxy believed that Anakin was killed in the 501st's attack on the Jedi Temple trying to defend the younglings. One of Legends' better twists of irony.  
> -"The network" Vanth refers to is freedom trail made up of safehouses, surgeons and other beings who help slaves escape to freedom.  
> -There's no canonical evidence to support the idea that people on Tatooine gave a shit about who Anakin was, but I would have to imagine that he's some kind of folk hero -- local kid makes it big, you know?  
> -This is where the "Mandalorian morality" tag comes into play. Bounty hunting is frequently an unsavory profession. Yes, some genuine criminals are hunted down, but bounties are issued by people in power and can be used as a tool to suppress political or ideological opponents. There is a reason Boba Fett is an antagonist in the OT. Din and Boba both have likely done some extremely sketchy things for some extremely sketchy people (see Eps 1-3 of Season 1).  
> -The shyyyo bird is my friend.
> 
> Your song for the week is "Grace," Lil Baby ft. 42 Dugg. Thank you for reading! Back to the palace on Friday, and we will earn a bit of our "E" rating as well.


	6. mando'a and other glossaries

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter will be a moving, updating glossary of mando'a and other words! Feel free to reference at your leisure.

## Official Mando'a: 

_Alor:_ Leader, captain. In a formal military setting an _alor_ commands a unit of soldiers. In Din’s frame of reference, his _alor_ is his tribe’s leader.

 _Aruetii:_ Outsider, foreigner. A non-Mandalorian. Plural is _aruetiise._

_Beroya:_ Bounty hunter. A very common Mandalorian profession, I assume because they’re a little bit unhinged. 

_Beskar:_ Mandalorian iron, though I think it _has_ to be some kind of steel alloy. The ingots Din received in payment for the child were definitely Damascus steel proxying beskar, so??? Who knows. 

_Beskar'gam_ : Mandalorian armor, specifically a set of armor made from beskar. Other metals (durasteel, allows, alum, etc) are acceptable when beskar is thin on the ground. I tend to assume that Din's first set of armor was durasteel. 

_Beviin:_ Lance, spear. 

_Buy’ce_ : Helmet. Specifically the beskar, T-visor helmet iconic to Mandalorian armor. 

_Ca’tra_ : Night sky 

_Dar’manda_ : A Mandalorian who has lost their way/heritage/Mandalorian soul. A heretic. A very serious state to be in; think of a religious person who has lost their faith. Din believes that he falls into this category because he’s broken his Creed. 

_Djar’ika_ : Little Djarin, dear, sweetheart, etc. A term of endearment, from Din’s name, Djarin, and _-ika,_ a diminutive. - _ika_ takes the place of the last syllable in a word. 

_Gal’ika:_ Little hawk, little falcon. From _galaar,_ hawk, and _-ika,_ a diminutive. Affectionate, in this case. 

_Gev:_ Stop, enough. 

_Jate:_ Good. 

_Jetii:_ Jedi, singular. The plural form is _jetiise._

 _Jetii’kad_ : Lightsaber. Literally “Jedi sword.” 

_Kad:_ Blade, sword. 

_Kute_ : Mandalorian clothing, “flightsuit,” the clothes underneath a Mandalorian’s beskar. Tough and full of circuitry to support beskar’s many functions. 

_Luubid_ : Enough.

 _Mand’alor_ : “Sole ruler.” The leader of the Mandalorians. A role that has been vacant for some time, as Satine Kryze was the _Duchess_ of Mandalore, not _the_ mand’alor. Non-Mandalorians refer to the _mand’alor_ as Mandalore the _______. (Preserver, Great, Unifier, Wise, etc.) 

_Mirshmure’cya:_ A headbutt, a Keldabe kiss. Lit. “brain-kiss,” because, you know. Mandalorians. 

_Oya:_ “Let’s hunt,” but more significant; a mando’a pump-up phrase. _Oya,_ like many Mandalorian words, is contextual. 

_Rang:_ Ash.

 _Sha’kajir_ : A cease-fire, a truce. 

_Sheb’urcyin:_ Kissass, brown noser, sycophant 

_Shereshoy_ : Lit. “lust for life,” but colloquially difficult to translate. A Mandalorian word meant to encompass the Mandalorian spirit, including the desire to hunt, desire to live and the fleeting nature of Mandalorian life; basically a term for embracing the day and all it has to offer. 

_Tihaar_ : Mandalorian moonshine, for want of a better term. Specifically described as a clear, fruit-based alcohol -- very much not wine, as the Wookiepedia entry says _tihaar_ can also be used to strip paint off spaceships. This is a common application for moonshine where I’m from, and moonshine can also be flavored with fruit pretty easily. 

_Tiingilar_ : A spicy Mandalorian stew. Mandalorians have a high spice tolerance and love spicy food. Some have translated _tiingilar_ to mean "eat at your own risk." I imagine it kind of like biryani or a curry; something that has a general recipe list, i.e. a meat, a starch, some vegetables and whatever spices are on hand, but varies from batch to batch.

 _Tomad_ : Ally. 

_Uj_ cake: Also called _uj'alayi_. A sticky, sweet dense cake, made with dried fruit. A Mandalorian dessert. 

_Verd:_ A soldier, a warrior. 

_Vod/vode:_ Brother/sister, brothers/sisters.

 _Vor entye_ : I apologize, lit. “I accept a debt.”

## Other Words I Made Up, Because Karen Traviss Did Not Consider My Needs When Throwing Mando'a Around: 

_Maza_ : Used by Boba to describe his _tihaar_ . Think agave; a tough desert plant you can also get drunk as shit off of. If you want a visual, assume Boba's _tihaar_ is basically mezcal. 

_Ni gaa’tayl:_ Help me, give me strength. From **_ni_ ** , Mando’a possessive, “my, me” and **_gaa’tayl_ ** _, “_ help.” 

_Nu entye:_ There is no debt, colloquially “you’re forgiven.” Apparently the concept of forgiveness does not exist in canon Mando’a, _Karen._

 _Par’bevii:_ Lit. “spear-form, spear-style,” bastardized from **_par_** _u, “_ form,” and **_bevii_** _n_ , “spear, lance.” Refers to the specific training once receives when learning how to effectively fight with a spear. 

_Par’kad_ : Lit. “sword-form, sword-style,” bastardized from **_par_** _u,_ “form,” and **_kad_** _,_ “sword, blade.” Refers to the specific training one needs to learn how to effectively swing a sword. 

_Psid'ik:_ Think space guava. Derived from guava's scientific name. Alcohol flavored with guava is delicious.

 _Tal'vod, tal'vode_ : Lit. "blood-brother/sister" ( _tal_ meaning blood, _vod_ meaning brother/sister). Conceptually a "sworn sword" situation. Think of a knight (in this case, Koska Reeves or Axe Woves) swearing loyalty to a lord (i.e. Bo-Katan). Then throw in the classic Mandalorian sense of duty to underscore how serious the vow is. I am operating on a "Mandalore as a feudal society" system, because otherwise it makes no goddamn sense to me. 

  
  


## Non-Mando’a Words and Phrases: 

_Alain’ah_ : (Non-canon) Tusken. Translates loosely to “hospitality” but more literally to “open-handedness.” The closest real-world proxy is the [ Bedoiun concept of hospitality](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honor_codes_of_the_Bedouin), called _diyafa._ The word _alain’ah_ comes from Arabic, الانفتاح or **_alain_** _fit_ ** _ah_ ** _,_ meaning “open-handedness.” 

_Anooba_ : Tatooinian. Functionally a jackal. I too thought that AO3 user fialleril made these up until I spotted them on the wiki. 

_Aza’gad:_ (Non-canon) Tusken. Ritualized dueling with two _gaderffii._ Think fencing, but with big fuck-off clubs. The goal is to disarm your opponent, not seriously maim them, so it serves as a test of skill and dexterity over brute power. 

_Bladeback_ : A desert boar. Don’t fuck with them. 

_Bumping beskar:_ Y’know. Boning. Applies to both inter-Mandalorian relationships (i.e. two warriors literally bumping beskar) and a Mandalorian/non-Mandalorian pairing. Very little in Din’s case, as his covert believes the Helmet Stays On. 

_Cedru_ : (Non-canon) Tusken. A desert tree. Real-life proxy is cedar (my favorite tree), a tough, hardy fellow that thrives in extreme environments. In Tusken society, _cedru_ wood is highly prized. Only chieftains have the right to harvest a _cedru_ tree and use its wood to make their _gaderffii._ Derived from the scientific genus of cedars, **_Cedru_** _s._

 _Chess haku uba naga. Soong alla junkie:_ Huttese, mostly canon (it’s hard to find fucking participles) - translates roughly to “Take what you want. It’s all scrapmetal.” 

_Easda:_ (Nod-canon) Tusken. A porridge made with grass seeds and bantha milk. Think oatmeal but a little rice-y.

 _Flan:_ Mon Cal. A form of currency. 

_Gaderffii:_ A prized Tusken weapon. This is what Boba used to go ham on all the stormtroopers on Tython. A sort of double-ended staff; one end has a bigass club and the other is sharpened into a point, or has a sharp sort of spearhead attached. Tuskens value their _gaderffii_ much like Mandalorians prize _beskar._

 _Ghuy’ra:_ (Non-canon) Tusken. “Outsiders, enemies, strangers.” Non-Tuskens. Derived from Arabic غريب, **_ghu_** _rayb,_ meaning the same. 

_Japoor_ : Canon. A tough, woody desert plant. Good for carving. In this fic, _japoor_ seeds can be ground to make a meal, which can be made into a flat, naan-like bread. I don’t know what the yeast situation is like on Tatooine. 

_Kung:_ Huttese, "scum," an insult. (80% of Huttese is an insult.)

 _Peggat_ : Huttese. A form of Huttese currency; one peggat is roughly equivalent to forty credits. 

_Rahm:_ (Non-canon) Tusken. “Stop, enough, have mercy.” From Arabic رحمة, **_rahm_** _a,_ mercy, grace, pity, clemency. 

_Rust and dust_ : Colloquial, "dead and gone, dead and buried."

 _Silik lizard to the sands:_ Silik lizards are massive fuck-off lizards native to Tython, uniquely adapted to a desert habitat. Has the same energy as “like a fish to water,” i.e. being adapted for one’s natural environment. 80% of my time working on this fic is actually just developing idioms. 

_Sleemo_ : Huttese, “slimeball.”

 _Tamur_ : Dried dates. A Tusken food: I drew a lot of Tusken food headcanons from Bedouin culture. Tuskens probably drink a lot of bantha milk. Non-canonical. 

_Tuskra_ : (Non-canon) Tusken. “The people,” the Tusken name for themselves. 

_Usul’gad:_ (Non-canon) Tusken. The particular fighting style for fighting with a _gaderffii._

_Walking the way of the wurrek:_ Another idiom, _and_ one that’s alliterative! Used to describe someone like a berserker, but with a negative connotation; basically a warrior who can’t distinguish friend from foe and attacks anything in their path. A wurrek is a nightmare animal most often found on spaceships and in caves. Blind, toothy and reactive, wurreks are known for entering a shark-like feeding frenzy and chewing their way through a ship’s crew. Their appetites are voracious and they do not fear death, presumably because death is scared shitless of wurreks!

 _Womp-tail:_ Colloquial, "rat's ass." 


End file.
